


A Promise to Your Villains

by ThisDominionIsMine



Series: Mover of the Mountains [1]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Communal parenting, F/M, Found Family, Furiosa does not have a rape backstory, Literal Sleeping Together, Medical Trauma, Slow Burn, character study that grew legs and a brain, constructing a socialist commune surrounded by feudal states is a nightmare, stubborn bastards saving each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2015-08-24
Packaged: 2018-04-08 21:35:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 45,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4321590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisDominionIsMine/pseuds/ThisDominionIsMine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The god-kings are gone. One thousand, three hundred and twenty-seven days after the slaying of Immortan Joe, Max rides in from the east with the sunrise at his back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Forlorn Skies

We all saw Furiosa in that first fight with Max. Shotgun doesn’t shoot? Beat him with it. He gets away from you? Grab the bolt cutters and beat him with those. He pins you down? There’s a heavy-duty hose nozzle right next to you – beat him with _that_.

The woman sacrificed her prosthetic – which probably took ages to scrap together – to kill Immortan Joe. She would have killed Max and Nux without thinking twice if she’d been given the option. She doesn’t have the patience for inaction, for ruling. And founding a socialist commune in a sea of semi-capitalist, semi-feudal city-states is dangerous work.

Toast and Capable do well at ruling with the advice of the remaining Vuvalini. The Dag spends a lot of time in the gardens, teaching the ex-Wretched and War Pups how to grow. Her daughter, when she is born, learns to walk between the green aisles; she is called Sapling. Cheedo finds comfort amongst the Milking Mothers, who know the same kind of pain and fear as the wives. She’s still a child in a lot of ways – sixteen, still growing. She learns how to tune the piano in the wives’ old quarters and plays for the Mothers. And Furiosa… Furiosa takes what’s left of their War Boys, the growing War Pups who still want to fight, teaches them to stand their ground instead of charge head-long. She places scrap-metal sniper targets around the perimeter of the Citadel and has them practice aiming from the tops of the cliffs, accounting for wind and gravity, breathing steady before they shoot. She teaches the Mothers this, too.

When what’s left of the Gas Town boys come to collect the cost, Furiosa and her snipers blow out their war rig’s engine while it’s still a kilometer away. They’re given a choice: leave the rig and its cargo, or die. The next time tankers roll onto their territory, they’re escorted by troops from both Gas Town and the Bullet Farm, come to beg for what Immortan Joe called “Aqua-Cola”. They offer enough Guzzoline to give every ex-Wretched heat and light during the cold nights, and enough bullets to stave off a siege for half a year. Then they fill up their tankers with water and drive home.

The god-kings are gone. In the vacuum, Imperators fight each other and make peace by turns, but they learn to keep their fights clear of the Citadel. Furiosa has an itchy trigger finger.

One thousand, three hundred and twenty-seven days after the slaying of Immortan Joe, Max rides in from the east with the sunrise at his back, casting a shadow for the snipers to track long before he reaches the Citadel. A panicked War Pup finds Furiosa brooding over the mountain of steering wheels, rushes out three hysterical “is it him?”s before she turns around. He’s still a crumb in the distance when she reaches the crest of the butte, but lone riders are few and far between, and everyone knows that the Citadel has new rules. The sun is higher in the sky by the time he’s close enough to be identified through her telescope. She only needs to look for a moment.

“Lower your weapons.”

The Fool returns.

***

He sleeps for a day and a half, curled up in a ball in the corner of the library. The first time he wakes up, Capable is trying to escape from a shoelace that is knotted around her hands and holding them behind her back while Furiosa watches and gives occasional instruction. She looks away from Capable when he moves, and slides a plate towards him. There’s a new prosthetic on her arm. The plate holds a thick slice of fibrous bread, plus a small pile of green beans and some kind of roasted meat. He eats all of it and falls asleep again before Capable frees herself.

The second time he wakes up is early the next morning. The Dag and Cheedo are standing together, murmuring over a book while the Dag cradles a blubbering toddler in her arms. There is a pitcher and cups sitting on the table next to them.

Max crawls to his feet with creaking joints and embedded dust shedding from folds in his jacket. He drinks a single cup, then stops and studies the half-empty pitcher.

“You can have more,” the Dag says. “We have plenty.” She watches him gulp down two more cups, then tells him: “They’re serving breakfast. Straight down the hall. You can’t miss it.”

***

Max is standing guiltily at the door of the mess hall when Furiosa walks up. She waits for him to register her presence before she touches his arm, but he still jumps. “Too many people?”

He blinks, squints into the room, then shakes his head and tries to back away just as a quartet of giggling children rush around the corner and almost bowl him over.

“I’ll get you a plate. Wait here.” Furiosa slides past him and follows the kids to the serving counter, where they bounce up and down and say “pwease” eight times and “thank you” five more in the twenty seconds it takes the Mothers to serve them.

“Two, please,” Furiosa says. The closest Mother looks at her, then past her at the doorway. Max has been discovered by the last of Immortan Joe’s War Boys, who are crowding around and calling him “bloodbag” as a cheerful nickname.

Twin plates of corn, potatoes, and skewered lizard scrape across the counter to Furiosa. She grimaces her thanks.

***

 They eat on a ledge overlooking the canyon between buttes, where the dwellings of the former Wretched are now ground to dust by the desert. Everyone lives inside, she tells him. Everyone eats and drinks and sleeps without fear. They have done well. Toast and Capable have a gift for ruling and rebuilding.

Max doesn’t say much. He asks Sapling’s name, and if they want his bike back.

“Are you staying?”

He shrugs.

“We could use it. But if you want it again, it’s yours.”

He nods at this, then stands up and asks to see the gardens.

***

It gets cold outside the Citadel at night – even more so as they swing into what used to be winter. They barely have enough blankets for all the Mothers and children, nevermind the thousands of former Wretched, and making more is a slow process, but they do have the ancient mechanisms of climate control to keep the many chambers as warm as possible, and they pack bodies together to heat the chilled spaces. The girls long ago gave up their beds to pregnant Milking Mothers; they prefer to share a mat in their library, tangled together, keeping each other warm and alive.

If they really wanted to, Gas Town could stop the flow of Guzzoline and kill a significant number of the Citadel’s residents by letting them freeze through the winter. But they would have to find another source of water, first. Toast is always reading; she finds records of trade deals between the Citadel and Gas Town, knows how much water they need, how many bodies they are trying to keep strong. She gives them just enough to make a statement: killing the Citadel means killing Gas Town.

Furiosa sleeps in the same room she owned as an Imperator, when she sleeps at all: there are too many nights she spends up in the cold, wrapped in a blanket, a rifle at her side, according to everyone else. Obstinate.

Max stops following her at the door.

“You should sleep,” she says.

“I’ll keep watch.”

“That’s my job.”

He looks at her with raised eyebrows, then nods at her mat without saying a word. It’s hard to challenge silence.

She sighs and undoes the first buckle that holds her prosthetic onto her shoulder. “You first.”

Max shrugs and crawls onto the mat as she finishes detaching the metal arm; he pulls off his jacket, stuffs it under his head, and faces into the wall. Furiosa makes her pillow from the shreds of an ancient blanket, then hauls a rare, intact blanket over both their bodies with her right arm. Her spine presses against his back into the darkness. Warm.

When she thinks his breathing has settled into sleep, she moves away. An inch of air between their shoulders. Less warm. A hundred slow breaths, then two inches. Three. Four. She gives him three hundred breaths before she slides out from under the blanket at a slug’s pace, reaching for her prosthetic.

Max sits up and pulls on his jacket. “I’ll go with you.”

She scowls into the gloom. “ _Sleep_.”

He’s already cradling her rifle against his chest, waiting for her to resume strapping on her arm. He shrugs. No words. Moonlight is seeping through the window and glinting in the corners of his eyes.

“It’ll be cold.”

He shrugs again, then gathers up the blanket with one hand and leans over to drape it over her right shoulder while she finishes fussing with buckles. “We’ll take turns.”

Furiosa sighs. “Fine.”

***

There’s a War Boy named Scat whose legs end at his knees sitting watch at the western rim of the tallest of the Citadel’s three buttes. He turns his head to register their approach, then settles his rifle more firmly against the side of his wheeled chair and spins a tight circle to face them. “Imperator.”

Furiosa bows her head. “We’ll relieve you. Get some rest.”

Scat nods and taps the shoulder of a sleeping teenage girl who is curled up against a nearby boulder under a blanket. Her skin is so dark she seems to be an extension of the shadows. “Yabby, we’re done.”

Yabby stirs and frowns. “Done? Why didn’t you let me-” she catches sight of Furiosa and relaxes. “Oh. Imperator.” She climbs to her feet and takes the rifle from Scat, then follows him as he wheels back along the path to the interior of the Citadel.

Furiosa looks over her shoulder at Max. “I’ll take first watch.”

He nods.

They toss down Furiosa’s mat and settle against the boulder where Yabby was sleeping so they can share the blanket. A curve in the northern face of the rock shields them from the moonlight; a sniper on the ground would see only a shadow. Max nestles himself into the curve and promptly falls into the forced sleep that Furiosa learned as a War Pup: taking advantage of any momentary pause to kill the engine and recharge the batteries, until the background hubbub increased in volume or a dangerously long amount of time had passed and her body understood that it needed to move again. She watches Max sleep with his chin tucked down into his chest for a few moments. If he wakes up too fast, he’ll crack his skull open on the rock an inch behind his head. So Furiosa props her rifle against the boulder and eases her right arm across his shoulders, tugging slightly until he slumps sideways against her, head tucking into the crook of her shoulder. His hair is as short as when she first met him: someone has shaved his head recently, and badly, judging by the unevenness and handful of bare spots where they cut too close.

The wind never stops moving across the salt. The Citadel chops up its currents, makes them spin strange figures and corkscrew up the sides of the buttes. It’s always worse at the top, but the boulder shields them from all but the most forceful wayward gusts. Down on the ground, the wind picks up sand and carries it for a day and a night before setting it down, or throwing it into the fury of a dust storm so it can scrape flesh from muscle and muscle from bone and grind stone into ever-smaller teeth to chew apart the tiny lives of humans. Dust clouds the distance; there is no line where the horizon should be, only the sudden appearance of stars that increase in density as her vision climbs higher into the sky.

It is not the best night to be keeping watch. But it is not a terrible one, either.

The blanket and Max keep Furiosa’s core warm, but the cold licks at her face and ears, and the exposed stub of her left arm. When her vision begins to blur and her mind fogs, she rolls her left shoulder to let the stump catch a fresh blast of cold air and jump-start her body so she can continue to scan the horizon.

The moon has moved enough to cast light across their feet when Max wakes up. His breathing pattern changes dramatically from quiet sleep to something near hyperventilation, and then he sits up so suddenly he almost knocks skulls with Furiosa. He grunts an apology and shifts out from under her arm, rubbing at his neck with one hand while holding the other out for her rifle.

She hands it to him carefully, tracking the way his eyes jump between distant points, reflected moonlight glinting from the depths of his pupils. “You okay?”

Max blinks and judders out of his trance. He nods twice in quick succession, then leans back against the boulder, lays the rifle across their laps, and raises his left arm to repay her shelter of his skull from the rock.

Somehow, they make it work: she’s taller than him, but his torso is longer, and the difference lets her cushion her head without wrenching her back. She studies the angle of the moon and tells her body that it has two hours before she needs to sit watch again. Then she inhales the dust and motor oil and leather smells of Max’s coat, and lets her body shut down.

***

She comes awake all at once to the sound of Sapling crying somewhere below them. It’s been less than two hours, but not much. The sky is in the deep darkness of predawn. Max grunts in question and looks down at her with a furrowed brow, left arm still slung over her shoulders, right hand gripping the rifle.

“Dag’s girl,” she murmurs, and he nods. “She has nightmares about the storms.”

Max grunts and nods again, then adjusts to let Furiosa sit up.

She blinks and scrubs grit from her eyes, the better to squint across the desert. Just wind and sand and salt.

“When’s the next one?” When Furiosa glances at him in confusion, Max gestures at them, the rifle, the desert.

“Next shift?”

He nods.

Shifts run midnight to dawn, dawn to noon, and so on. Scat and Yabby were on the dusk to midnight shift, and would have passed the information about Furiosa and Max’s presence to whomever was supposed to have midnight to dawn. At dawn, people will start insisting that they come inside. The only reason they’ve let them stay out this long is because she has Max with her, instead of pulling an entire shift by herself. “Maybe two hours. We change at dawn.”

Max nods. “I’ll do another hour.”

“No,” Furiosa says. “I can’t sleep with her crying.” Sapling is still wailing underneath them.

“After she stops, then.”

“Deal.” Furiosa tucks him under her shoulder once more while he readjusts the blanket, then leans her head back against the boulder, gaze drifting between the moon and the indistinguishable rim of the horizon. It seems to take a long time for Dag or Cheedo to calm the girl, but she’s only a baby – her caretakers are still girls themselves, in many ways. This is a painful world to be a child in.

Max begins to stir not long after the crying ceases, and Furiosa suspects that he never truly fell asleep again, but it’s hard to argue with a man who says ten words every two hours, and she knows it won’t be long before they’re both forced inside. She goes to sleep against Max’s chest with the first gray tendrils of light reaching over the top of the boulder to bleach the infinite night out of the sky. She wakes up to Toast standing over them with arms folded across her chest and a scowl on her face, and smiles.

***

Down below, Furiosa nudges Max towards her room. “Two more hours. Let’s go.”

She’s sure he only follows her because she’s allowing herself to get more rest, too, but they both need it. They fold into the same position that they started last night with: back to back. She tries to listen for when Max’s breathing drops into sleep, but that’s too much of a challenge when her own body is in the process of shutting down as fast as it can.

A tentative knock on the door and a beam of sunlight glaring on her face through the narrow window eventually rouse her. This time, Max doesn’t move when she crawls off the mat. Prosthetic in hand, she cracks the door open and steps into the hallway.

Cheedo is standing there with two plates in her hands. Furiosa sees potatoes, corn, and the remnants of a small lizard. They sit down together against the wall so Furiosa can let go of her prosthetic before Cheedo hands her one of the plates. “Are you okay?” she asks softly.

“Still breathing,” Furiosa murmurs back around a mouthful of lizard tail. “What happened?” Cheedo has grown much from the day she begged to be captured so she could help Furiosa cross between vehicles to rip a man’s jaw off. She doesn’t have the same talent for leading that Toast and Capable do (and Angharad did), but she possesses a burning desire to assist and aid the dreams and ambitions of anyone she can. The Milking Mothers love her for that, Furiosa knows. Everyone does.

Cheedo licks her lips. “The Weatherseer –” a woman with terrible aches in her bones who has studied some of the old books on clouds and weather patterns “ – says she feels a storm gathering. One day, maybe two.”

The Citadel was built for dust storms, but not with this many people. Every room with a window has appropriately-sized stones to block them up, but that ugly theater that Immortan Joe staged his speeches and water-giving from now has people living in and around it, and becomes a howling cavern of biting sand when the storms hit. The butte-top gardens of fruit and nut trees will be battered, but survive, and the greenhouses will need to spend at least a day in the dark to protect their more delicate plants. And Cheedo’s face broadcasts that she isn’t done. “What else?”

“A signal from Gas Town, just after dawn. They want to talk to you. Wouldn’t say why.” Cheedo pauses. “Capable thinks they’ve seen a war party coming in. Toast thinks they want to kidnap and ransom you.”

Furiosa smiles. “And what do you think?”

Cheedo hesitates before answering. “I think they want their war rig back.”

“Almost certainly,” Furiosa agrees. “I’ll go.”

Cheedo frowns. “Will you bring friends?”

“A few. On bikes. If they want their war rig, they’ll have to come take it.” She glances over her shoulder at the wall to her room. “Leave the plate, and let him sleep. I’ll be back before the storm.”

***

Gas Town is half a day’s ride across clear, flat desert on the busted-up memory of a road. Furiosa has three women on her flanks: Yabby (the sentry), Cab (kidnapped weeks before the death of Immortan Joe, good with a shotgun, reminds Furiosa of Valkyrie in every way), and Piker (thin, frail, pale, and loaded down with knives). They roar into the center of the smog pit that is Gas Town in the middle of the afternoon and leave their engines running while they wait to be greeted.

There aren’t many Wretched in Gas Town. Just slaves on the oil wells and in the refineries. Their buildings are stone, too, but built and stacked, not carved out of solid rock. But there are few buildings to live in: barracks, that’s all. The slaves are sleeping outside under crude lean-tos and piles of sand.

“Can’t we help them?” Cab says, just loud enough to be heard over the engines. She’s to Furiosa’s left, with Piker to the right and Yabby behind.

Furiosa shakes her head. “We’d die trying, and the Citadel would be lost.”

Cab scowls and shakes her head, spitting to the side as Gas Town’s leader approaches.

There has been a change in management since they last time they dealt with Gas Town, Furiosa recalls. There had been Servo: young, bold, eager to collect power and tighten the collars. The man coming towards them is older, half his face slack and hanging under the white, burned skin. Dirge. There are a dozen boys with guns following him. Teenagers. Boy-men.

Furiosa lets him get up to five paces away before she calls “That’s close enough” over the engines.

Dirge stops walking and gestures for his followers to do the same, then folds his arms over his chest impatiently.

Furiosa turns off her engine. There’s some hesitation before the women behind her follow her example. “What do you want?”

“You still got our war rig,” Dirge says slowly. “And our scouts are telling tales of strange sigils beyond the horizon in the north, moving this way.”

“There’s nothing in the north except salt-”

“For a hundred days and a hundred more, yes, yes, yes, we were all told this as children. The point, Imperator, is that somebody new has come to visit our little corner, and it would be wise to stand together against them.”

“Our Weatherseer tells us a dust storm’s coming in two days,” Furiosa retorts. “We haven’t troubled you for shelter.”

Dirge looks around himself. “We got a lot of things that can burn, if we need them to. What say we tell these strangers of a couple mountains full of women and children, send them your way? Let you try to beat them back, with nothing to run your engines or fire into their skulls.”

Furiosa closes her eyes so she doesn’t have to feel all the eyes staring at her. “What do you want?”

“Our war rig. And a little help from our oldest friends.” Dirge is smiling with the non-drooping side of his face when Furiosa opens her eyes.

“No war rig.”

“Knock-knock at the Citadel-“

“But we will send fighters to aid you, _if_ these strangers appear on the horizon.”

Dirge is shaking his head. “Give us snipers. We have plenty who can fight up close. I want them dead before our boys can do more than _think_ about getting wet.”

He is terrified, Furiosa realizes. Only recently risen to power, still tamping down internal threats, suddenly confronted with an enemy that he and his small cadre of loyal supporters (who likely number the dozen men behind him, maybe a few more) are unlikely to defeat.

“Five thousand units of Guzzoline for ten snipers,” Furiosa hears herself say.

“Four thousand.”

“Four and a half.”

Dirge looks around, at the soldiers and slaves and women who are all watching him, then nods. “Deal made, Imperator.” He extends his right hand.

Furiosa lets him walk up to her bike to shake, and feels his grip grind the bones in her hand. He holds on for so long that she’s afraid he’ll try to pull her off her bike and kill her on the spot, but then he clears his throat and steps back.

“Until next time, Imperator.”

Furiosa nods and turns her head to find a path out of Gas Town. Her eye catches on Yabby, who is just now slowly lowering the rifle that she had focused on Dirge’s eye socket. She gives Furiosa a small smile, then slings the rifle back across her shoulders and guns her engine to life.

***

The dust storm is boiling up faster than the Weatherseer predicted. The winds howl at them through the sunset as they roar across the salt, picking up sand to scrape against their faces and hands and pour through their engines. The Citadel is less than an hour away when Piker’s bike screams in protest and dies, fishtailing across the sand and flinging her into a dune.

“Leave the bike,” Furiosa has to yell over the wind as they circle around to collect her. The wind is gathering more strength with every second they waste, and there are red clouds churning on the eastern horizon, preparing to hurl themselves across the salt and batter apart any human in their path.

Piker climbs onto Cab’s bike and they start off again, gunning towards the lights that are shining through the windows of the Citadel and slowly disappearing as each opening is wedged full of rock. They roll into the canyon and into the sheltered interior of the garage as the dust swirling in the sky begins to blot out the stars.


	2. Breathe Armageddon

The garage has steel doors welded together with parts from the carcasses of two dozen cars: doors and hood covers and siding panels patched into two mismatched puzzle pieces that don’t quite fit together perfectly. Their hinges squeal as they are hauled shut behind the last of the bikes. Then the reinforced steel frame of an 18-wheelers truck bed gets slid in front of the doors to bar them shut.

Toast is waiting for them. Otherwise, the garage is empty of humans, except for the team of War Boys who haul the doors shut, bar them, and scurry off. Every square foot of space has something on it: a car, a bike, a salvage truck, a pile of parts. This is technically the secondary garage: the primary one can only be reached via elevator platform, and used to be home to the old war rig and all of the war party vehicles. Gas Town’s war rig is up there now; they finished affixing a sand plow to the front grille ten days ago. When the storm started picking up and they ran out of time to keep hauling things up, they shoved it all down here instead.

“Get in a scrap?” Toast asks, eyes tracking Piker as she climbs off the back of Cab’s bike.

“With the storm, not Gas Town. It’s not far; we’ll go dig it out when this finishes.” Furiosa sets down her kickstand and leans back to roll her shoulders and let her spine pop. “Gas Town swears they’ve seen someone new coming down from the north. We’re trading them snipers for Guzzoline when they get closer.”

“I had to point a rifle at him to get us out of there,” Yabby chimes up. “They _really_ want our help.”

“Alright. We’ll talk it over with the council tomorrow.” Furiosa’s guards bow their heads and exit, but Toast folds her arms across her chest and levels her gaze at Furiosa. “Speaking of frantic men, someone searched through every room in two of the mountains this morning before we realized that he was looking for you.” The buttes are connected by tunnels deep underground, so that people can still move between them even when the criss-crossing catwalks have to be taken down. This does not make Max’s fanaticism less impressive.

Furiosa does not bother to respond to the question buried in that statement. “Is everything sealed up?”

“As best as it can be. We’ll be sleeping people in the mess hall and anywhere there’s extra space until we can clear out the sand from the skull theater and repair the damage.”

“Use my room if you need to. I’ll sleep in the library tonight.” Furiosa pulls off her goggles and begins wiping sand from her face when she realizes Toast is still staring at her. She sighs. “Where is he?”

Toast shrugs. “Helping cover the skylights in the greenhouses, last I saw.”

***

Max is not covering skylights in the greenhouses; when Furiosa finds him, he is in the kitchen slicing carrots for a stew. Cheedo is next to him, chopping potatoes. Sapling is doing laps of the kitchen, “helping” the Mothers by running small items from place to place. She appears at Max’s knee carrying an empty bowl and a pair of carrots. She hands him the whole carrots, and he slides the chopped ones into her bowl so she can spin in a circle and dart off again. Moments later, she reappears with no bowl and four dirt-encrusted potatoes, and waits for Cheedo to lift her onto the counter so she can dunk the potatoes in a bucket of water to scrub them clean, bare feet kicking joyously as she splashes. “Hi Auntie Fury!” she yells when she sees Furiosa. She raises her dripping arms for a hug.

Furiosa picks her up to give her a hug and then sets her back down on the counter, mindful of her sand-encrusted clothes so close to fresh food. “Did you have a good day?” she asks as Sapling goes back to her potatoes.

The three-year-old nods vigorously while Cheedo smiles in the background. “Ma said there’s a storm, so I helped save the plants, and got to eat a corn. And Uncle Max helped-” (Max appears to jerk out of his carrot-chopping haze at his name, and Furiosa can’t get a word in to explain that, to Sapling, _everyone_ is “Uncle” or “Auntie” except the Dag and Cheedo, who are “Ma” and “Mummy” respectively.) “-and then we found places for people to sleep, and now we’re helping here.” She pauses to inspect a potato before she hands it to Cheedo for chopping. “Is the storm scary, Auntie? It sounds loud.”

Furiosa doesn’t want to lie to the child, so she stares pleadingly at Cheedo until she comes to the rescue: “If we were outside, it would be scary. But we’re inside, and we have thick walls and strong doors, so we don’t have to be scared. We just have to stay inside, and we’ll be safe.”

Sapling considers this. “Okie, Mummy.” She goes back to scrubbing potatoes.

Furiosa watches her for a moment to ensure there are no more questions, then steps over to Max’s station. “Everyone’s her aunt or uncle,” she murmurs, both of them staring at his hands as he slices through another carrot. “Sorry if I scared you.”

Max shakes his head and shrugs without looking at her, but he cuts the next carrot a little slower.

“What can I help with?”

He looks up to glance around the kitchen. “Corn?”

“Alright.” She grips his shoulder, then steps around him to forge through the masses of people in the kitchen. She spends most of the next hour with corn cobs gripped firmly in her prosthetic, shucking them with her right hand, in the middle of a bubble of warm humanity.

***

They’ve blocked up every window and entrance, but ventilation shafts tunneled throughout the rock of the Citadel prevent the buttes from becoming claustrophobic tombs. With no natural light, they keep a number of lamps running in the hallways and chambers, fed by enormous generators deep within the recesses of each of the buttes. The place still feels like a gratuitously large coffin to Furiosa. After dinner, she has to go sit in one of the shrouded gardens and surround herself with rows of sleeping plants until she can believe that no one is going to suffocate overnight.

Max doesn’t follow her – not right away. He stayed behind with Sapling to help clean up. But an hour or so later, Furiosa hears Sapling chattering from a nearby hallway, getting closer with every breath.

“-and Ma says she’s a god of war, and wisdom, and crafting, ‘cause I guess you can be a god of a lot of things if you’s good at ‘em, but I dunno how you get good at wisdom, because I thought wisdom was just knowing things, and everybody knows a lot of things, ‘specially the gods, but I think she’s the only god of wisdom, so maybe she just knows everything all the other gods know and then something else that’s secret that nobody knows, or maybe – oh, that’s my corn plant!” Sapling enters Furiosa’s field of view, towing Max towards the end of a cornrow by his wrist.

While Sapling details the virtues of this specific corn plant, Furiosa finds her feet so she can walk down the aisle towards them, keeping her pace slow until both of them notice her.

Sapling bounces on the balls of her feet, poking a finger at one of the corn stalks. “This is where I got my corn today!”

“I heard. Aren’t you supposed to be in bed?”

Sapling scrunches up her face. “But I’s not tired?”

Furiosa locks eyes with Max over Sapling’s head, and his mouth twitches. “Hey.” He kneels down so he and Sapling are conversing at the same height. “How many plants are in this room?”

“Uhhhhhhhhhhh, fifty thousand?”

“Can you count them?”

Sapling beams. “Yeah!” She starts with the cornstalk directly in front of her and begins skipping down the row, brushing each plant with her hand as she adds it to the tally. “One-two-three-four-five-six-seven…”

“She’s going to come back and tell you twenty million,” Furiosa murmurs.

Max shrugs as he stands.

They walk back to where she was sitting earlier, and slump down against the wall together. At the other end of the room, Sapling is still tallying: “Hundred three, hundred four, hundred five…” as her shadow is cast tall against the wall by the amber light of the lamps.

Max is fidgeting with his hands, not looking at her again, until Furiosa bumps his shoulder with her own. When he glances at her, she lifts her arm, and he tucks himself into her side the same way he did while sitting watch, almost like it’s an instinct.

“Sorry,” she says again, and he pats her knee in response. They breathe together, watching Sapling’s shadow as it transitions from skipping to walking over a number of minutes, and her voice lowers in volume.

“Seven thousand, eight thousand, nine thousand…”

Furiosa taps Max’s shoulder with two fingers to make sure he’s listening.

“’Leven thousand, twelve thousand, thirteen thousand, fourteen thousand…”

She grins, and he muffles a snort into her shoulder, shaking his head. They relax into each other, and Furiosa lets her head lean back against the wall and her eyelids droop. Max breathes warm and heavy against her side.

“Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty thousand, thirty-one…”

***

“This doesn’t look like the library,” says the Dag’s voice.

Furiosa opens her eyes. The light hasn’t changed: there are still dim amber lamps burning, and the skylight is still covered by a heavy-duty tarp weighed down by small boulders. She can still hear the distant howling of the sandstorm. But the stiffness of her limbs and the energy with which the Dag moves tells her that it must be morning. She tries to sit up, before realizing that Sapling is curled in a ball against her chest under Max’s jacket, dead asleep. Max himself seems to be working on waking up, though weighted down by the darkness of the room and the blunt exhaustion that a lifetime of fear incurs. Furiosa blinks a few more times as the Dag kneels next to them.

“Cheedo said you were here; we weren’t worried,” she murmurs before Furiosa can apologize. “Don’t think there’s a safer place in the world for her.” She brushes a strand of white-blond hair behind Sapling’s ear. “We’re on the back end of the storm; it’ll burn out somewhere past midday. Get to spend tomorrow digging everything out.”

Sapling comes awake blinking and squirming. “Ma?”

“Right here.” The Dag gathers her up, letting Max’s coat slump across Furiosa’s lap, and walks out of the room.

“We should get up,” Furiosa says.

Max grumbles something into her shoulder that sounds distinctly unenthused by her suggestion.

She taps his skull lightly with her prosthetic, her right arm still encircling his back. “Come on.”

He bats her metal fingers away, then sits up, joints popping as he scrubs a hand through his hair. “The girl?”

“The Dag took her. Probably getting breakfast.”

Max nods at this. He rubs at his face like he’s trying to shove away his weariness.

“Come eat something. Then you can go sleep in my room.” Her hand falls to his jacket: warm, the right sleeve cut away at the elbow. Without thinking, she lifts it, drapes it loosely across his shoulders, bracing her hand there so she can steady herself as she stands. Then she offers that same hand and pulls Max to his feet in a single motion.

He shoves his arms into the sleeves as he follows her through the gardens, then catches up as they enter the hallway to the mess hall so that they are walking side by side, shoulders brushing in the narrow darkness of the tunnel.

***

They eat in the primary garage, sitting up on the hood of the stolen war rig. They are the oldest people in the room by at least ten years: everywhere else, War Boys who were teenagers when Immortan Joe died are teaching their youngers (many of them girls) to replace spark plugs, check oil levels, and cobble together nitro-boosted engines from scrap.

“Want to help me with something?” Furiosa asks once they’ve finished eating and have lapsed into silent observation.

Max grunts in interest. Food has boosted his energy levels to the point where he looks simply tired instead of about to collapse.

“One of our bikes blew out its engine coming back from Gas Town. Ate too much sand from the storm. Less than an hour out, but I’d like to pick it up as soon as possible, before it gets buried or stolen. Could use a second pair of eyes.”

Max nods at this. He wipes some sauce off his plate with his index finger, then sucks it off with a contented humming sound.

“Was that a yes?”

Max nods again. When she elbows him in the ribs, he grunts and shoves back with his shoulder, catching her momentarily off guard and making her reel sideways.

When she regains her balance, she grabs the plate out of Max’s hand and stacks it atop hers, further up the hood, then slams her foot into his thigh to knock him off the rig. He lands on his right shoulder and rolls onto his back, then scrambles to his feet, hands in front of himself, ready to defend. She doesn’t move off the hood. Instead, she braces her feet against the top of the sand plow and leans forward with her elbows on her knees. “You could have blocked that.”

Max lowers his hands. “Perhaps.” He moves as if to climb back up next to her, then grabs her shoulder and makes to throw her off the hood. She uses the move as a springboard to leap straight forward onto the ground, then spins and grabs the arm that he still has reaching backwards, at the extent of what his shoulder will allow.

They both spin, trying to get behind each other, but Furiosa has the better grip and twists Max’s arm up behind his back so he can’t use it. She turns him to face away from the war rig as his free hand find a hold at the base of her prosthetic, and the leather straps holding it onto her stump creak.

Max hesitates.

Furiosa shoves at the small of his back, then follows him down until he’s on the ground and she’s kneeling over him. He lets go of her prosthetic on the way down. “Don’t play so nice next time,” she rasps into his ear.

He mutters something that might have contained an obscenity.

Furiosa smacks him lightly on the shoulder. Then she looks around and realizes there are half a dozen giggling teenagers peeking over cars to watch the two panting adults on the ground. She rolls her eyes.

Max flips himself over, looks at her, looks at the kids, snorts, nudges her out of the way, and hauls himself to his feet. “I think the storm’s over,” he says.

Their audience scatters.

He turns to Furiosa. “What are we driving?”

***

They go out in a salvage truck: it has a flat bed and three different kinds of winches affixed to the rear, as well as a large hook dangling from a five-meter crane mounted on the back. Its engine is not much smaller than her war rig, but the crane tends to upset the balance of the machine, so sharp corners at high speeds are discouraged. She has Max keeping an eye out the window for anything metal-shiny, which is a task made more difficult by the recent deposition of an abundance of sand that is entirely composed of small, shiny objects and has thoroughly upset the pattern of wind-carved dunes that Furiosa had grown accustomed to driving through.

It takes an hour to reach the approximate location of the bike, and almost another hour of spinning in dizzying, overlapping circles before Max shoves his arm out the window to point and she jerks the steering wheel to the right so hard the crane almost topples them over.

As it turns out, what Max spotted wasn’t the handlebars or part of the fuel tank: it was the front wheel of the bike, protruding from the top of a newly-formed dune. Here, the crane makes up for all the irritation it caused Furiosa, as they hook in around the piece of metal that connects that wheel to the handlebars and winch it sideways out of the dune. Then it’s just a matter of strapping the bike onto the flatbed so they don’t lose it on the way back, and driving home.

They didn’t talk much on the way out, but now, with the bike found, with Max’s feet propped up on the dashboard, with the low-hanging sun glaring into his face even as he stares out his window, she asks: “Why did you come back?”

Max turns his face towards her. “Do I need a reason?”

She interprets that as “I don’t have a reason,” and doesn’t respond beyond a one-shoulder shrug.

Max settles a little deeper in his seat and redirects his thousand-yard stare out the windshield. “There are people far in the north talking about ripping open the Citadel, one girl at a time.”

Furiosa’s entire body goes numb.

“They want Gas Town and the Bullet Farm, too, but they think that if they take the Citadel, and the water, the others will fall without a fight.”

“Gas Town tell a similar story,” Furiosa croaks. “But in theirs, they’re the ones in danger. I thought they were lying.” She presses down on the accelerator, trying to feel something: wind on her face, sand in her eyes, the sun-heated metal of the steering wheel. Nothing. She yells “ _shit_ ” out the windshield at nothing, and careens the truck around a dune while the crane wobbles menacingly. “Why didn’t you _tell me_?”

Max says nothing.

Furiosa forces herself to inhale. “Gas Town is demanding snipers, or they’ll ride against us,” she rasps. “If they do, we’ll die.”

Max frowns and turns his head away to stare at the sunset.

Furiosa slams her hand against the steering wheel, bruising her knuckles. “ _Fuck_ ,” she screams into the deepening dark. “ _Fuck!_ ”

***

They’ve already started hauling the assorted machinery out of the secondary garage: rearranging it, tweaking, tightening, dispersing their scouts across the wasteland once more. Several people have to scramble out of the way of the salvage truck as Furiosa throttles it through the bottleneck of the canyon. She skids it to a halt on the platform to the main garage, kills the engine, leaps out, unbuckles the various straps holding the bike flat on the truck bed, than stalks around to Max’s side as he’s climbing down, grabs his right wrist with her metal hand, and hauls him off the platform just as it becomes level with the floor of the garage. She tows him into the interior of the butte, to what used to be the war room for Joe and his sons and Imperators, and is now the place where their ruling council meets.

Toast and Capable sit on the council, along with a pair of representative from the Milking Mothers, a pair from the War Boys, and four from the ex-Wretched. They have elections on the summer and winter solstice; Toast and Capable are the only permanent members. Furiosa technically has the right to be on the council, but she attends less than one in five of the weekly meetings, too jittery to bicker over whether they should plant more wheat or cotton this year, or if they’re willing to barter for the glass to build another greenhouse.

Five different people are trying to talk over each other when she shoulders past the pair of sentries at the door and drags Max into the room after her. The room goes quiet.

“Furiosa,” someone murmurs.

“What’s the blood bag doing here?” asks one of the War Boys.

Toast clears her throat. “We were just discussing the credibility of Gas Town’s claims about the northerners.” She tilts her head to the side. “Something to add?”

Furiosa realizes she still has Max’s wrist trapped in her prosthetic. She lets him go, and he immediately takes a step back. “They’re half-lying, but they’re half-right,” she says. “Someone’s coming, but they want to strike here first, and bleed Gas Town and the Bullet Farm dry with thirst so no one can stand in resistance.”

“And Gas Town’s promising to fight against us unless we give them snipers to defend themselves,” says Cab, who is one of the representatives for the former Wretched. She laughs. “What a thicket we’ve landed in.”

“So Gas Town’s trying to save their skins by holding us down while these newcomers rip open our belly, is that it?” barks a Milking Mother named Polly who does not possess a right leg.

“Wait,” says the War Boy who called Max a blood bag. “How do you _know_?”

Furiosa looks over her shoulder. Max is scuffing at the floor with his feet, but he looks up when he feels her gaze. She touches his shoulder with her right hand. “You met them, didn’t you?”

He nods. The closed-off façade of weariness drops from his face, replaced by something more serious and cynical. “They have water,” he says, “but they’re running out. When they come, it will be all of them. Fighting men, recruits, children, women – with no hope behind them. They come from the ruins of a dead city. They have more people than you, they have more cars than you, and they do not want to consider anyone who does not follow their religion.” It is more words than Furiosa has heard him say the entire time he’s been back.

“And what _is_ their religion?” Capable asks.

Max smiles a wry, bitter smile. “Their king is the son of a god, and they only reach Heaven by dying in battle. Anything else, everyone else…” he makes a nonchalant shooing gesture with his hands. “Pointless.”

“We have to fight,” someone says.

“We’re going to die either way,” says someone else.

Max looks at Furiosa like he’s checking if she needs anything else from him. But right now, all she wants is her rifle, and something to shoot it at.

Toast has to shout over the growing ruckus: “Take the night to think it over; we’ll meet again tomorrow.”

People quiet down a little, and some rise to their feet, but Furiosa is already moving away from the noise and the light that threatens to overwhelm her, wrapping herself in the darkness and safety of the tunnels. As soon as she is out of the room, she breaks into a run – a sprint – through the black with its pockets of golden light, back towards the garage, and back towards her rifle.


	3. Awake Too Long

She disassembles her rifle sitting on the ground in front of the war rig, cleans each individual component, reconstructs it, then goes to her room to find the rest of her guns. She doesn’t see Max anywhere. She brings the tattered blanket back to the garage with her so she has somewhere to place cleaned pieces besides the hood of the war rig. Then it’s back to the rhythm: strip, clean, oil, rebuild. She’s aware, distantly, that a couple of the more insomnia and PTSD-riddled mechanics are watching her from the edges of her vision, loitering a little closer when they have a pause in their work. At one point, a fresh bottle of solvent appears less than a minute after she thinks about getting up to grab a new one. The process of cleaning weaponry, in and of itself, is reassuring, like doing minor repairs on her arm. She knows how everything works at the most intimate level, and it would require a great deal of carelessness for her to do something that would damage the machinery instead of improve it.

The moon is shining through the open windows when she finishes the last gun. There are two mechanics working in distant corners of the shop who she can hear more than she can see. She piles the guns into the large canvas bag that she brought them down in. Then it’s back to her room, to stash them away around her desk and workbench or hang them from the racks on her walls. She lingers there, staring at the mat where she sleeps, the window, the door. It’s all too exposed. So she slings the ratty blanket over her shoulder once more and goes back to the garage.

One mechanic is still there, staving off sleep by fussing with the wiring behind a car’s dashboard, cursing under her breath. Furiosa makes her way back to the war rig, which is stolen, not hers, but a war rig none the less. She climbs into the driver’s seat, unbuckles her prosthetic and sets it down next to the gearshift, then kicks her feet up onto the passenger seat with her back to the door, huddles under the blanket that reeks of gun oil, and goes to sleep.

***

Today, a buzz-saw wakes her up.

It takes a minute for her to find her prosthetic and fold up the blanket, but nobody looks her way until she actually climbs out of the war rig. Attention spans ripple across the room: a few gawk, some glance, and the rest are too buried in engines or tangled up with wires to process anything short of an explosion outside of their immediate field of view.

But then Furiosa herself has to take pause, because Max is sitting in front of the war rig. He holds up a plate of food before he realizes that she’s holding her prosthetic and has no free hand to take it with, and then he pauses and watches her movements.

“Follow me,” Furiosa says, and stars walking. After a scuffling second of delay, Max’s footsteps are following her out of the garage.

She takes him down to the skull theater where Joe made his speeches from. The vast, gurgling pool of water that used to be here has been rerouted to communal areas throughout the Citadel, though they still keep a small cistern along the rear wall for the people who have chosen to make their home here. The area was evacuated during the storm, with no way to seal off the mouth of the skull against the raging winds and ripping sand, but the opening was still small enough that most of the structures built within (a communal eating area, a walled-off corner that serves as a bathroom, a low wall around a children’s play area) are still standing, if a little scratched up and filled with sand. They go sit just behind the teeth of the skull, overlooking the canyon.

Furiosa sets her prosthetic in her lap and takes her plate from Max. “You never met him, but I used to have a lieutenant named Ace. Oldest War Boy anyone knew. Older than you and me together, almost. He had a… something in his brain, two or three years before. A blood clot. We all thought he was going to die – it wasn’t cancer, they couldn’t cut it out, it was _in_ his brain, hurting him. I actually trusted him, so I was glad he survived. It did something to his face, killed some of the muscles, but otherwise he was the same grim, determined bastard as always.” She pauses and looks at Max’s face, which is a mask of mild interest. “And then he tried to stop me from taking the girls, and I threw him off the rig.”

“I saw that,” Max murmurs. “Is this a threat?”

Furiosa sighs. “You can take a car and leave if you want, but if you stay, I need to know that you’ll stand with us. You know more about the northerners than anyone here, and if you decide that theirs is a just cause…” She lets the sentence die, picks up the thread of a new one. “I have to protect the people here.”

Max nods.

***

When the council reconvenes, Furiosa is in the room from the beginning. She sits at the edge of what used to be Joe’s dais, where he kept a skull-encrusted throne that has since been disassembled and burned. Sitting on the lip of the dais puts her at eye-level with the council members seated in chairs around the wide table made of polished sandstone: separate, but no higher. Max comes with her again, evaluates the political situation with a few seconds of blank staring, and then parks himself on the ground, left shoulder just brushing Furiosa’s right knee. She told him that he didn’t have to come, to which he shrugged and muttered something incomprehensible and kept right on following her.

Polly – the Milking Mother representative with only one leg – is the last person to enter. She wheels her chair to the far end of the table, facing up the room towards Furiosa and Max, and clears her throat. “What the hell are we doing, folks?”

A lot of people look at each other in silence.

“Kill them?” ventures the War Boy who called Max blood bag last time.

“Call the Bullet Farmers in,” says the other representative for the Mothers, tall and dark and broad. Dixie? That sounds right.

“And if they decide to join against us in the middle of the brawl?” asks Cab.

“What’d they do that for? They know they’re next,” says a Wretched representative who has black skin, black hair, and black eyes.

“Why don’t we just give Gas Town their snipers, then? Could save us some trouble!”

Furiosa groans quietly, and Max leans his head against her knee. It makes her feel a little better.

“Could we stand a siege?” asks a voice Furiosa can’t identify.

“We’ve tunneled too many entrances on the ground,” says the black Wretched. “Even if we sealed them up in time, one good blast and they have an open door.”

“How does Gas Town even know these people are coming? They’re to the south; I thought these invaders were coming from the north.”

Toast breaks in: “They are from the north. But Gas Town is Gas Town: the Guzzoline for a hundred-day scouting trip is nothing for them.”

“And if these people come down from straight north,” Capable adds, “we’re set pretty well between them and Gas Town.”

“They might hit the Bullet Farm too, then. ‘Specially if they come from more eastwards. Have we told them what’s happening?”

Max moves restlessly next to her in a way that indicates a desire for violence, so Furiosa sets her hand loosely on his shoulder to keep him down. He lifts his head to stare at her with raised eyebrows while one of the other Wretched representatives tries to shoot down Toast’s explanation that the last thing they need is for the Bullet Farm and Gas Town to conspire to serve up the Citadel on a platter for the northerners.

Furiosa bites the inside of her cheek and squeezes his shoulder, then moves her hand to the back of his neck, just above the welt of Joe’s brand, and rubs her thumb in small circles. “I’ll stand up and yell if we need to make them listen,” she mumbles, and hopes that he hears.

He must, because he relaxes back against her leg.

“What about the Buzzards in the east? They don’t like us, but they’d like invaders even less.”

Polly pounds her fist on the table, making the thunder ring back off the walls until everyone is silent. “You forget,” she says. “Here, we trust each other and work together. We have for years now. But out _there_ –” she jerks a thumb at the wall behind her, the endless desert beyond “- there, they cut off girls’ legs to eat, rape and burn women’s corpses for sport, and kill because it’s easier than asking.” She looks down the vast length of the table at Furiosa. And at Max. “Do I lie?”

Furiosa shakes her head.

At her feet, Max sits very still, addressing the table instead of the people above it. “If you could bring the three together, you might win. But you won’t.”

“Won’t stand together? Or won’t win?” It’s Cab who asks.

Max shrugs.

 “Cut off the water,” says Dixie. “Now, before these new friends come to visit. If they stand with us and we win, all goes back to normal. If we lose, then we’ve hastened their miserable deaths. They might as well thank us.”

“That’s no way to build trust,” Capable murmurs.

Toast scowls. “It could save us.”

“What if we contract with the Buzzards and the Rock Riders?” asks a War Boy representative who is missing a sizable chunk of flesh from his left cheek that looks like it was removed with claws. He’s been quiet so far. “Offer them Aqu- water. Tell Gas Town and Bullet Farm what we’ve got on our side, let them sort it out, and thirst while they do it.” His proposition is met with cautious silence.

Furiosa clears her throat. “The Rock Riders aren’t fond of me, but if I drove out with a few thousand gallons of water as tribute, they might agree to deal. You’d need to catch a Buzzard alive and send them back with the message before they’d listen.” She looks at Max, and at the hand she still has on his neck. “How long until the northerners come?”

He wrinkles up his face at the question. “Maybe weeks. Maybe months.”

“That’s helpful,” Toast says dryly. “Tells us we need to get moving.” She shares a glance with Capable. “We’ll hold the vote on cutting water to Gas Town and the Bullet Farm when we know more. For now: all in favor of treating with the Buzzards and Rock Riders, set down your tokens.”

Max furrows his eyebrows and strains to look as a number of people adjust and dig into their pockets. Furiosa leans down to whisper:

“It’s a gesture. More personal than just raising a hand.”

Capable’s goggles thud onto the table next to Toast’s music box. Cab sets down an intricately-carved knife as the War Boy with the clawed face holds out a hollow six-pointed star on a thin yellow chain. Dixie procures a string of small white globes that shimmer with many pale colors when the light strikes them, and rattle against the tabletop.

Polly glowers, the War Boy who calls Max blood bag fidgets in his seat, and the three other Wretched representatives glance at each other and murmur among themselves.

“Furiosa,” Capable says softly. “We seem to have a tie.”

Furiosa nods as she rises. She lets go of Max, and moves her hand to the buckles around her midsection. It takes her two steps to close the distance to the table, where she sets down her prosthetic amidst the rest of the tokens. “Six over five,” she declares. “I’ll find a tanker to fill.”

***

They walk back to the residential area together with Toast and Capable. The three women lead, discussing logistics, while Max keeps a step off their heels, wrapped up somewhere inside his own head.

They’re either going to have to dig a tanker out of some hidden corner of the Citadel or have one welded together from scrap, because the only one of reasonable size anyone can remember off the top of their head is attached to their stolen war rig: far too large, and capable of drawing far too much attention.

“We’ll send an escort with you until you’re through Buzzard territory,” Toast says. “Might be able to get a captive to send home a message.”

“I’d rather skirt them for this run. I don’t want to risk any lives that we don’t have to. Send out a salvage truck along the fringe of their territory with a team of snipers, blow out the engine of the first car that comes to investigate, grab anyone who survives, and tell them our terms.”

“Which are… water for life?” asks Capable.

“For starters,” Furiosa says. “If they want weapons and spare parts, they can have them. They just have to come when we call.”

“And if they won’t believe that they’re in danger… which… are they?” Capable looks between Toast and Furiosa, who cannot answer her beyond shrugs and bitter twists to their mouths. “So we have no leverage.”

“We have… very little,” Toast concedes. “Might want to ask the Dag to start praying again.”

Furiosa frowns, then looks over her shoulder for the shadow that is Max. “How much do you know about their god?”

Max’s silhouette shrugs. “It tells them the world fell to wipe out the plague of humans, and it’s their job to finish off anyone left. Especially the women. ‘Bad earth’.” A lamp highlights his frustrated expression for all of a second.

“The old world had a story like that, I think. The Dag read it somewhere. But it was a flood. And it took everyone except one man and his family,” Capable says. “But I don’t think they were told to kill people.”

Toast mutters “So they’re chosen ones” to herself and then, louder: “How did you survive meeting them?”

Max is quiet for a very long time. “It was a scouting party.”

“They didn’t survive meeting you,” Furiosa guesses.

He grunts something they all accept as confirmation.

“At least we know they die.” Capable tries to make her tone light but winces almost immediately. “And that’s… a good thing.”

Toast steps ahead of Furiosa so she can wrap an arm around Capable’s shoulders, and they move ahead together, heads bent, murmuring. Furiosa slows down to walk with Max. He says nothing as they trace a winding path through the corridors, falling further and further behind Toast and Capable, often hesitating before they tread through patches of moonlight.

“I might be gone a few days,” she tells him.

They pass through another patch of moonlight before he responds. “Going alone?”

“I don’t have to.”

He seems to still be mulling that one over when they reach an intersection: garage to the left, residential areas to the right. They pause at the edge of it. The hall to the left echoes faintly with the ringing of metal against metal.

Furiosa looks at Max. “What will you do?”

He turns that thousand-yard stare on her, refocuses into the present, then – slowly, carefully – steps in, touches one hand under her chin to keep her still, rises onto his toes, and brushes his mouth over the furrowed skin between her eyebrows. It’s her turn to stare when he drops back down. “I’ll find us a tanker,” he mutters, and vanishes in the direction of the garage.

***

The overwhelming majority of Furiosa’s experience with men has been confined to giving orders, receiving orders, attempting murder, committing murder, avoiding being murdered, and breaking the fingers of wandering hands. It never occurred to her to ask anything about her father before her mother died. She is aware, conceptually, that there must have been _someone_ to help initiate the process of pregnancy, but that’s the extent of her knowledge about her paternal ancestry.

The girls are different, and the same. They were all taken as conquests, as children and teenagers, from homes and families and communities that they have scattered memories of, but lack any notion of how to get back. Nobody has a big enough map with the right names anymore. But they – in quiet, scattered moments – do talk about their parents and siblings. Toast’s older sister showed her how to load a rifle; she’d been promising to teach her to shoot, but was away with a trade caravan when the War Boys came. Capable had four younger brothers and a father who all died within the span of a minute. Cheedo was taken before she turned ten, but she remembers being hungry a lot, with parents who were too ashamed to answer her questions. And then there’s the Dag, whose parents had books – not many, but some. Enough. Stories about three men following a star across a desert; about a man swallowed by a giant fish; a doctrine for the last day of the world.

Furiosa has not had a script to follow for most of her life. Following the framework of orders – take Aqua-Cola to Gas Town, bring back Guzzoline – was about as close as she got. Small things, like “thank you” in response to an act of kindness were stripped away with her abduction. Instead, there was “witness me/witnessed”. Pull trigger/watch something die. When she took the girls, she hadn’t planned for a dust storm, or the bog, or being wrong about the Green Place. Definitely hadn’t planned for a muzzled blood bag appearing around the back of the rig lugging a half-dead War Boy, a car door, and a busted shotgun. She had the war rig, she knew how far and fast it could go, and how many bullets it would take to get through the windshield or a door. Somehow, that had been enough.

She’s standing in a corner of the library (which is really just the main room of what used to be the wives’ quarters, now with pregnant mothers in all the real beds) watching Toast flip through a small book by lamplight as she murmurs to Capable, who is doing calculations in the dirt. In a more shadowed corner, Cheedo and the Dag are curled together on a mat with Sapling between them. The Dag had fallen asleep with one hand cupping Cheedo’s cheek. When Sapling shifts restlessly in her sleep, they both draw closer, covering her, as if their shield of humanity can keep out the cold.

Toast snaps her book shut with a sigh, then winces and shoots a glance at the sleeping trio. “My eyes hurt,” she whispers. “I can’t do any more of this tonight.”

Capable wipes off the bullet she had been writing with and nods wearily. “In the morning,” she agrees. “Furiosa?”

Furiosa blinks. “In the morning,” she agrees. Something about trading. Gas Town and Bullet Farm. How long they could live.

“Rest,” Capable says, and it would be an order if she weren’t smiling softly, one hand trying to nudge Furiosa out of the fixed standing position her body has locked itself into.

She uncrosses her arms and shifts her weight to the left, and her body clicks back to life. “See you two in the morning,” she murmurs, and heads for her quarters.

Max is there. Of course he’s there. She can’t even pretend to be surprised that he’s there. She knows before she walks in, too, because he’s turned on the lamp on the wall and is staring out the window, blocking a significant portion of the moonlight.

She starts unbuckling her prosthetic. “Hey.”

Max grunts acknowledgment without moving his head. His eyes flick across the space outside the window.

“Find us a tanker?”

His chin jerks. “Three thousand gallons. Downstairs garage. Need to move a few things out of the way.”

“That’s fine.” Furiosa sets her prosthetic on her workbench. “We should leave early.”

Another grunt.

Furiosa walks over to the window to check what Max is so intrigued by, but sees nothing except the cliffs of the Citadel and an empty desert, safe under the darkness of a starry sky.

That’s what Max is staring at: the sky.

“My mother used to tell me stories about the stars,” she murmurs, then falters. Her voice is loud compared to the soft sighing of the wind.

Max turns his head towards her and makes a quiet noise of encouragement.

“It was a long time ago. I don’t remember much. There was a bull somewhere. And a… a hunter. Some kind of great hunter. Orion.” She lifts her hand, hesitates, looking for the red star she remembers. “A scorpion was sent to fight Orion. I don’t remember who won. That red star is part of it.”

Max makes a confused noise in his throat and looks at her, so Furiosa steps behind him, lining up her arm over his shoulder.

“Right next to that wide milky band, there’s a red star. Not the big red one – that’s Jupiter. Below that. It’s in the middle of a chain of bright blue stars. And that hook they make, the curl through the band, is the scorpion’s tail. And to the left of that, on the other side of the band, there’s an archer named Sagittarius-” She hiccups to a stop. It has been a long, long time. Something aches deep under her breastbone. Something else is closing up her throat.

Max turns around in the narrow space between Furiosa and the wall, eyes a little narrowed, head cocked to one side. He touches her cheek with a brush of two knuckles and she closes her eyes. Her hand brushes his arm, his side, over his jacket, as she tries to breathe around the lump in her throat. His forehead presses against hers. “Hey.”

She tries to smile, but loses it somewhere around her lips, so she makes a fist in Max’s jacket instead and lets him fold around her: hands on the back of her neck, middle of her back, her face tucked down against his neck, because it’s dark there, and safe, and she doesn’t have to think about the shining white death that will be waiting outside in the morning.

“Hey, hey,” Max says. “Bed, yeah? Get some rest.”

Furiosa’s throat clicks as she nods, but she straightens up anyway, pulls off the last of her belts, watches Max shed his jacket and hunt for the blanket without really processing any of it, and then she’s sitting on the sleeping mat and her boots are off, the room is dark, and Max is kneeling in front of her, two fingers touching her knee.

“Good?”

She nods. “Good.” She waits for Max to crawl under the blanket and turn towards the wall before she lies all the way down, staring at his back. “Thank you.”

Max twists so he can look over his shoulder at her with raised eyebrows, then scoots himself away from the wall like an indication of consent.

Furiosa feels the knot in her throat give way. She shifts close enough that she could tip her forehead against the back of Max’s neck, and folds her arms into the space between them.

Max heaves a weary sign.

“What?” she murmurs, to no response. She chews on air for a moment before remembering that Max is capable of expressing his opinion without saying a word at all times. So she closes the space between their torsos and folds her arm over Max’s ribs, and he responds by settling a hand over hers and releasing a breath that is not a sigh, but something much lighter. “Go to sleep,” Furiosa mumbles.

Max pats her hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shoutout to the fellow Scorpios - couldn't resist. ^^,


	4. A Higher Tide

Furiosa wakes up with the dawn. She doesn’t move right away, just lies still and listens to Max breathe while the gears in her brain slowly oil themselves and creak into motion. They’ll have to fill the tanker with water and outfit the attached cab for a trip into the mountains, which will take up a significant portion of a day, but there’s no reason they have to get up and start work immediately. It’s nice to lie in the semi-dark and know that no one is about to burst through the door and begins screeching orders.

Max’s body runs an internal clock slightly different from her own, so the sun is partially visible over the lip of the horizon before his breathing pattern shifts towards wakefulness. He hums a little when she sits up, balancing on what remains of her left forearm.

“Hey.” She slides her right hand up his chest. “You said the tanker was in the lower garage?”

Max grunts and nods his head, eyes still closed. His heart thuds against her palm. When she nudges him with her knee he grunts again, before rolling onto his back and sitting up, leaning into her a little while he rubs sleep-grit from his eyes.

Furiosa pulls the blanket off her legs and shoves it to the side before she rolls to her feet. Her prosthetic is still in place on her workbench, her belts curled next to it, boots tucked away under the table. She brushes at the dirt encrusted onto her shirt, then looks over her shoulder at Max, who is in the process of climbing to his feet and wandering over to the window. Then she shrugs at herself, strips off her shirt, and peels away the rough cloth that binds her breasts down and keeps them out of her way.

The girls keep telling her she should change her clothes more often, but two decades spent in supply convoys and war parties surrounded by kamakrazee, chrome-spattered War Boys tended to make any moment of vulnerability seem wastefully risky.

She pulls a clean strip of cloth from a drawer, pins one end against her breastbone with her stub, and starts winding downwards. The trick is acquiring enough friction to hold it in place but not to draw the cloth so tight that she can’t breathe, while using only one hand. It’s an imperfect art that takes too long every time, but whenever she turns her head Max is always studiously avoiding looking in her direction. When she’s done, she yanks a clean shirt over her head, and clears her throat so Max knows it’s okay to turn around. “We have clean clothes for you, if you’d like them.”

Max nods, still staring at the window. “Where?”

“Ground floor of the skull butte. Follow the splashing.” Furiosa turns away to strap on her arm again. When she looks back, Max is gone.

***

Skirting Buzzard territory to deal with the Rock Riders is an endeavor that will take at least five days if things go perfectly. Given the approximate zero percent chance of things going perfectly, Furiosa scrounges up enough Guzzoline for a trip four times as long, and enough spare water and food for an extra ten days on top of that that intelligent rationing could stretch to last for two cycles of the moon.

The tanker needs the kind of minor repairs that all the vehicles in the wasteland that have been used intermittently for the last fifty years need, so Furiosa sets a team of black thumbs on it. She only bars them from the cab because of the abundance of guns that she’s stashed in it, and does the electrical tune-ups under the dashboard herself so that none of the mechanics get their hands blown off.

She made herself a new wheel after Joe died; having a knob to ease steering with one hand is not a common feature, but one she appreciates. It clicks satisfyingly when she slides it onto the steering column.

She doesn’t see Max for most of the day, until she hears something explode, followed by whooping cackles that ring back off the canyon walls. When she sticks her head out the door of the garage, she sees a thick cloud of dust hanging between the buttes. Beneath it, there are a collection of white-plastered War Boys circling a brown ant that must be Max. She peers through the swirling grit until she’s certain that no one is hurt, then ducks back into the garage and almost runs into Yabby, who is trying to peer over her shoulder. “Bombs?”

“Outta gas and busted bullets,” Yabby offers cheerfully. “Could get a better view from up close.”

Furiosa manages a smile, but shakes her head. “Work to do,” she says, and gets back to it.

***

It’s not two thousand horsepower of nitro-boosted war machine, but it’s still close to a thousand horsepower to haul ten tons of water for days across the desert. They spend one more night in the Citadel, Max coming into the garage once it gets dark to work his hands raw on the tires and undercarriage while Furiosa lets grease bleed into her skin under the hood. They keep at it until the sky is the deepest, warmest black it can be in the hour or two before dawn. Then, once they’re forced out by scowling mechanics wielding wrenches and jumper cables, they slink back to Furiosa’s quarters and drop onto her sleeping mat without doing more than toeing off their boots.

Furiosa wakes up when Toast kicks her door open. It’s not a violent action – really, it’s because she’s carry two plates and a jug of water – but it startles Furiosa and almost gets the wind knocked out of her when Max’s brain triggers its combat centers and snaps his elbow back, grazing Furiosa’s ribcage before he remembers where he is.

There aren’t many wooden doors left in the world. Furiosa’s is not one of them; she welded together two siding panels and spent most of a day getting them on hinges and putting in a deadbolt because it made her feel better, in the land of masochists and guns, to have something she could close behind herself at night. She’s barely used the deadbolt since killing Joe, which is the only reason Toast doesn’t wind up with a broken foot. As it is, she almost drops everything she’s carrying when she sees the knife that Max has produced from some hidden sheath. It’s half again as long as Furiosa’s hand, the blade partially serrated, a gleaming metallic gray that Furiosa flinches to grab.

“Fool!” she hisses through her teeth.

Max jerks, and the knife thuds onto the mat. “Sorry.” He blinks and tucks his hands against his chest. “Sorry.”

Furiosa sets her hand on his shoulder and uses it to shove herself to her feet so she can reach Toast. “Here,” she murmurs, taking the pitcher that is ready to fall and placing it on her work bench, then reaching for the first of the plates. “You alright?”

“Big knife,” Toast mutters. She hands off the second plate to Furiosa so she can bend at the knees to hold out her hand. “Can I see?”

Max stares at her.

“Please?”

Furiosa stands at the workbench, watching to see if she needs to get between them. Yellow sunlight is blasting through the window; it’s past midday. They’ll need to leave soon.

Max takes one deep breath and hands Toast the knife grip-first.

She takes it carefully, turns it over in her hands to study the shape of the blade. “It’s heavy.”

“It’s a military knife,” says a voice that sounds a lot like Furiosa’s. “From when you didn’t have to be in the military to survive.”

“People don’t _have_ to fight,” Toast mutters dryly. “It’s just that or slavery.” She hands Max his knife back, grip-first like he did, and watches him tuck it away into a sheath on his thigh. “You didn’t have that last time.”

“Northerners,” he grunts.

Furiosa reaches for her prosthetic. “Just the one?”

Max’s face goes blank. He shakes his head. “Two.”

“Two military knives for one scouting party,” Toast says. She chews at her toothpick. “There some old world army base up north?”

“It’s salt and sand forever,” Furiosa says. “Could be anything up there.”

“A stash of guns and bombs and knives no one’s used for fifty years is a pretty big something,” Toast says. “Might want to be looking for one of our own.”

Furiosa picks up her plate with her prosthetic. “Let’s get some allies first. Corn stalks can’t aim rifles.”

***

They start out running straight south like they’re headed for Gas Town, sunset burning through the passenger side windows, cutting a wide berth around the Buzzards’ territory before they spin east towards the wall of mountains. The tanker judders when they leave the road.  Furiosa lets the wheel jerk under her palm, gives the machinery a moment to figure out the terrain, then sits deeper in her seat as the wheels keep spinning and everything holds together.

Max grunts a question mark.

“This rig wasn’t made for off-road. But it’ll hold.”

Max nods and kicks his feet up on the dashboard. It’s a gesture that tickles at Furiosa’s mind: it speaks of comfort with the vehicle, and with the driver. She tips her head back against the seat and nudges a little more pressure onto the accelerator.

Driving in the desert is mesmerizing. The horizon is nothing but low, sweeping dunes, with the sun already too far gone to highlight the mountains that are still hours in front of them. She can see the moon though, low and full, rising as if to track the sun by the path it carved in the sky, twelve hours late. She doesn’t want to force the tanker to deal with the dunes, so she’s steering around them as best she can with the dying light. It lengthens the distance they have to cover, but also lets her drive faster because she doesn’t have to worry about shredding the engine. It’s like they’re moving through one continuous, winding valley that shifts and splinters and always has a way to point her towards their final destination. She just has to stay awake and keep them moving.

‘Awake’, of courses, is a relative term when it comes to driving. She starts tracing constellations that she knows, inventing new ones, tracking her place between the dunes by the whistling of the wind around the tanker. It’s dark. Too dark to process the dunes as anything more than walls to a maze. They gave the cab headlights, but they wreck her night vision and refract off of the blowing sand instead of showing the way forward, so she doesn’t use them. But she’s driving. And that’s what matters. She can see a war rig in the stars with five girls hanging off the back.

Max touches her shoulder.

“Yes?” she says.

“Need rest?”

Furiosa blinks. She can’t see the moon through the windshield anymore; it’s above them. “You know how to find east?”

Max grunts and his shadow nods in her peripheral vision. He’s pulled a blanket from somewhere and draped it over his legs.

“Wake me up if we reach the mountains before dawn,” she murmurs, and takes her foot off the gas. She lets them roll to a stop before she throws open the door and climbs out. “Give me a minute.” She bends at the waist to brush her fingers against the dirt while Max clambers over to the driver’s seat. Then she straightens up, rolls her shoulders, and does a lap of the tanker to check for leaks in the tanker or punctures in the tires. When she gets back to the front, Max has his arms folded on the windowsill, chin resting on them, and is staring up at the Milky Way.

Furiosa goes to her knees, strips off her prosthetic, and rolls onto her back under the tanker, brushing her fingertips over the undercarriage. For the wider pipes, she uses her stump, which is less sensitive but has a broader base of contact to check for holes or dents. When she’s satisfied, she rolls out from under the tanker and grabs for her prosthetic but only catches sand.

Max is turning it over in his hands. He catches the moonlit expression on Furiosa’s face and drops it immediately while taking two very fast steps backwards.

“It’s okay.” She picks it up by the wrist and holds it out to him. “You can look.”

Max shuffles his feet as he retraces his steps, and kneels down next to her before he puts his hands on the prosthetic again. Then he sits cross-legged in the dirt while she props herself up on her elbow to watch him brush his fingers over the joints and supports that have maintained the structure of her life since she was a teenager. Max taps a thick wire, one of several she has placed throughout the arm. “Where did you get that?”

“An old wooden box with black and white buttons. The girls called it a piano.” Furiosa brushes a fingertip over the wire. “The wood shell was shattered, most of the buttons were missing, the little hammers inside were in pieces. But there were still some good wires.”

Max nods. He moves to hand the arm back, so she sits all the way up, but then he hesitates and looks between her and it like a question.

Furiosa extends her stump. “It’s simple.”

Max breathes a sigh. He fits the cup over her stump and the pauldron across her shoulder carefully, like he’s waiting for her to react to a pinch or sharp pressure. He slides the tongue of one belt into her hand, and then stops. She tightens the straps on her own, Max warm at the rim of her vision, eyes probably back on the stars.

Furiosa spins on her haunches and leans her spine against a wheel of the tanker. Max turns his face to follow her movement. She holds out her arm – the flesh and blood one – palm up, looking at the sickly white color her skin acquires under the moonlight. “You sleep?”

“Enough.”

She raises her eyebrows.

“Enough,” Max repeats. He leans in to tap two knuckles against her metal hand.

She doesn’t have a significant amount of control over the prosthetic fingers, but they react to gravity and how she bends her arm. It doesn’t have a palm, exactly, either, but she turns it so the fingers fall open, the joints that connect them to the wrist segment hidden under sturdier structural supports. She watches Max fit his fingers between hers, as the metal shifts and bends to accommodate a function that she never designed it for. She smiles a little, watching Max figure it out.

He looks at her, makes a little huffing noise, looks back at their hands, then holds out his right hand.

That one’s a little easier.

“We should get moving soon.”

Max hums agreement but doesn’t let go. Instead, he looks back up at the stars. Furiosa looks up too. Milky Way. Scorpio. Sagittarius. Orion. War Rig.

The tanker and the dunes shield them from the worst of the wind, and Furiosa is almost asleep when Max disentangles his flesh fingers from her meat and metal ones. He nudges her into the passenger seat and drags the blanket over her legs before he starts the engine, and the familiarity of the rumble puts her to sleep immediately.

They’re driving.

***

They don’t hit the bomb. The roar of the engine echoes back off the wall of mountains, dislodges a boulder that is approximately the size of a tire, and sends that boulder skittering down a very steep hillside until it reaches the bottom, skips twice, and comes down on top of the pressure plate that is the trigger for the bomb, which promptly disintegrates the boulder and a few cubic meters of hard-packed earth and turns it all into flying dust a hands’ breadth away from the front bumper.

Furiosa wakes up screaming. The first thing she processes is lots of very loud noise that her brain categorizes as a distraction and blocks out in an attempt to concentrate on the information from her eyes and body. It’s daytime. They are spinning in a way no truck hauling a three-thousand gallon tanker should spin, and Max is hauling on the wheel to desperately correct that movement, and there is nothing bust swirling dirt to be seen out the windows, and the truck’s center of gravity is changing faster than could ever be safe, and then the pattern of movement changes to such a pattern that Furiosa understands that it is important to grab Max and tuck their heads under her prosthetic and fold up her legs to protect their ribcages and hold on very tight until all of the chaos of movement and the last of the horrifically loud noise has stopped.

***

If you’re in pain, you’re alive.

If you are in pain, you are alive.

If you are still in pain, you are still alive.

***

Furiosa is in a lot of pain. Dull pain, which is better than sharp pain, but it’s a dull pain that is everywhere in her body: her shoulders, her spine, her hips, her knees. Her right hip is the worst. She takes one shallow, shaky breath. There is an incredible weight on her chest.

“Max,” she rasps. She tries to breathe again. “Max.”

The weight on her chest shifts. A hand touches her face. Max opens his eyes and moves off of her, eyes blank and staring. He croaks air into his lungs, cups Furiosa’s jaw, and presses his face into her neck. She throws her prosthetic around his shoulders and inhales so hard her ribs creak in agony. Alive. In pain and alive.

Max is twitching and muttering into her neck: “I’m sorry; I’m sorry; I’m sorry-”

“Hush.” She curves her hand over the back of his skull. “It’s alright. We’re alive.”

“A bomb…”

“I know. It’s okay.”

The cab is oriented all wrong. They’re still on the driver’s side; Furiosa can feel her wheel digging into her spine. She’s technically on her back, but gravity is also pushing them against the door. The cab is nose-down in the pit carved by the bomb, but the right side is still on higher ground. There is light streaming through the window in the rear, which shows nothing but clear blue sky.

“The tanker,” she says.

Max jerks away from her and scrambles out of where the passenger-side window used to be. Furiosa checks that all of her limbs still respond to her brain’s commands and that no irreparable damage has been done to her prosthetic, then climbs out after him. Her hip aches. Actually, her entire leg is howling, but the joints still bend when she tells them to.

The tanker is intact and upright, which is the best thing that can be said about the situation. It is also completely wedged in place between the walls at the mouth of a canyon, a hundred meters beyond the pit where the cab is trapped. The hitch that once held the cab and tanker together is partially crushed against one of the walls, but leaves enough space for Furiosa to clamber over it to view the other side, ignoring her screaming leg. There isn’t much to the canyon: she hurls a rock down the length of it and watches it skitter and rebound off the far wall. There is no water, no green.

“We’re about a day’s drive from the Rock Rider’s pass,” she says. “I don’t know who controls this patch, but someone planted that bomb.”

Max rolls under the belly of the tanker to stare down the canyon with her. Every part of him is twitching: eyes, neck, hands, feet.

Sand has found its way into the cup of Furiosa’s prosthetic; she strips it off and lets it dangle from her hand. “I give it ten days before Citadel sends a search party.”

Max grunts. “Will they?”

“It might be Toast and Capable on bikes, but someone will come. We just have to live long enough to be found.” Furiosa leans her weight back against the tanker to take some pressure off her hip. “You ever been here?”

Max shakes his head. His hands are fussing with each other, rubbing over rough patches of skin and tugging at dangling threads from his shirt. There’s a cut along the left side of his hairline, the blood already sticky and matting his hair. His spastic gaze lands on her leg, and he points with his entire hand, reaching through the air.

Furiosa looks down. An area about half the size of her palm has no cloth covering it, and no skin, and is missing a little more besides. It looks like someone dug a very sharp, square-cornered spoon into her leg and scooped out a mouthful. The door handle was probably responsible. There is already sand burning pain up the exposed nerve endings, packing more potential infections into the hole with each gust of wind. And now that she’s actually seen it, the pain multiplies.

“There are bandages in the cab,” she tells herself. “Antiseptic.”

Max bolts back through the gap between the tanker and wall.

Furiosa follows at a much slower pace, so that by the time she gets back to the edge of the pit there are five guns scattered in the sand along a trajectory that points down through the passenger window. A revolver launches through the opening as she approaches; she drops her prosthetic to catch it. “Down behind the driver’s seat,” she calls, and the scuffling inside the cab changes in tone and volume as Max alters his search.

The edge of the blanket is dangling out of the window, so Furiosa snags it and spreads it on the sand so she has a clean spot to take the weight off her leg. It helps for about five seconds. A powerful throbbing starts up as Max is climbing out of the window with the medical kit and a jug of water.

Furiosa makes him give the kit to her first so that she can soak a cloth with alcohol and order him to fix his head with it while she rinses grit off of her thigh with water. Then she shoves the end of one of her belts between her teeth, turns the bottle of alcohol on her leg, and shudders as the burning ember blooms into a bonfire. She’s breathing hard when she flips the bottle upright again and digs deeper into the medical kit. It doesn’t have much, but there are some proper, clean bandages stashed away. She binds a significant portion of her thigh to keep anything else infectious from finding the wound, but her hands are still shaking so hard she has to redo the final knot twice. “I’ll be good for sitting watch, at least.” She tries for grim humor. “And still have the one good leg.”

Max squints at her, still carefully patting at his cut with the cloth. When he doesn’t say anything, Furiosa sighs:

“We should set up on top of the tanker to have a lookout post. It’s the best position we’ll have, if we get everything else out of the truck.”

“Okay.” Max sets down the cloth and packs together the medical kit. He shuffles the loose guns onto the blanket next to her, then walks over to the cab and starts to climb back inside.

“Hey,” Furiosa says.

Max stops with one hand on the roof and one foot on the windowsill.

“There is still a door there.”

He wrinkles up his face at her and gets his other foot through the window.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

Max stops and bows his face away from her eyes. Then he shakes his head twice and disappears inside.

Furiosa sighs and starts piling the guns in her lap, checking that they’re loaded. She test-fires the shotgun out at the desert just to make sure it works, and the retort sets a fist-sized rock rolling down the hillside, followed by several the size of her head. When they hit the plane of the desert a hundred meters away, they set off another hidden bomb.

The explosion hauls Max back out of the cab in an instant, Furiosa’s rifle in one hand and a bag of rations in the other.

“I told you,” she says to the desert. “We’re on someone’s patch, and they don’t like visitors.” She checks over her shoulder.

Max is staring at the fresh dust cloud with a perfectly blank expression. He drops the bad on the blanket and kneels to set the rifle down next to it. “We should probably not shoot,” he says. “Unless we have to.”


	5. I Will Become What I Deserve

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is very much the chapter where the violence warning kicks in, and what happens will definitely be more explicitly gory that the movie, so some people may want to stop reading once the bomb-setters show up, and get a friend to tell them the most relevant plot points. If the first death in the chapter squicks you out, you should probably skip this one. This is the most violence there will be for a while; I have zero intentions of turning this story into a happy go-lucky murder-fest, I promise.

Furiosa’s leg is still capable of supporting her weight, but she has the distinct feeling that that is a non-permanent state of affairs, so she helps shift all of their supplies out of the cab and over to the tanker while she can still walk, and then climbs atop it to sit at the center with her rifle at her side and the blanket across her shoulders. While she kills time staring out across the desert, Max spends more than an hour carefully stashing their food and water under the shade of the tanker and stacking their spare Guzzoline against the wall of the canyon. When he’s done with that, he organizes their ammunition.

Furiosa lets him finish that project, but when she hears him start pacing circles while he tries to think of something else to do, she thuds the butt of her rifle against the tanker. “Get some rest, Fool.”

There is silence, followed by a sliding scramble as Max hauls himself up one end of the tanker. He stops when he gets his elbows over the top and stares at her down the length of it.

Furiosa glances at him, then goes back to the desert. “You can sleep, or you can sit. But you need to rest.”

Max grunts in irritation and pulls the rest of his body onto the tanker. It has a flat path along the top, like her war rig, so walking and sitting are easy. Max parks himself at her left side, next to her rifle.

She lets him have peace for a little while. The desert has fewer dunes here, more packed dirt, less wind. She misses her mountaintop panorama; she can only see straight ahead out of the canyon, and the sides are so steep and high that she can’t even guess what’s on the tops of them. There are a hundred angles they could be attacked from. She chews on the inside of her cheek when the pain in her leg flares up again, then sighs once it eases a little.

Max looks at her.

“Can I ask you something?” Furiosa tries to shift her leg to a better angle and winces.

Max starts to reach for her, then stops himself. He nods three times fast. “Yes?”

“You slept the first two days you were back. But you were awake for three more before you told us about the northern army.” She lays her rifle across her lap, barrel pointed away from him. “Why did you wait?”

Max doesn’t answer.

Furiosa sighs.

The desert drives back and forth against itself while they watch the sun drag lower in the sky. There will be stars appearing at their backs soon.

Max mumbles something.

“What was that?”

Max clears his throat. “Scouting party was twenty days north. I…” He pauses, thinks it over. “Didn’t stop much.” He touches his temple with two fingers. “Forgot.”

Furiosa has only a very basic idea of how Max’s brain works, but those ten words seem to fit with what she understands. Being so driven to reach a place that he forgot what he needed to do once he got there… that could be Max.

She nudges his shoulder with her own. “When I took the girls, all I knew was that we had to get to the Green Place. I didn’t have a plan for after.” She watches the sun begin to burn orange. “We didn’t drive for twenty days, but… I would have been lost, too, without the Vuvalini.” She lifts her prosthetic high and looks at Max.

He’s looking back at her. His mouth twitches before he slides under her arm, and his hand curves around her ribs. There’s nothing to lean back against but it’s still better than sitting alone with the pain in her leg. When Max sighs, her whole body feels it. Especially her leg.

***

They spend the night on top of the tanker. Max falls asleep with his head pillowed on Furiosa’s undamaged thigh, jacket draped over his shoulders like a blanket. The tanker is an unforgiving place to sit or lie for more than a few minutes, but Max is so tired it doesn’t seem to matter, and the numbness that creeps into Furiosa’s pelvis and legs is welcoming. She’d moved her rifle to her right side, out of Max’s way, but she keeps her hand on it at all times, rubbing her thumb over the barrel, the sight.

Her brain keeps firing off pain signals and dumping more adrenaline into her system. Mix that in with a thousand strange shadows and changes in the wind as it gusts around the tanker, and she doesn’t feel much like sleeping. She keeps seeing shifting, sandy figures climbing out of the wrecked cab and its bomb-carved grave, and they last just long enough for her to flinch for the trigger every time. There are lights in the desert, too. She can’t tell if they are stars or cars.

When Max wakes up for his turn at watch, she has to lie on her left side to keep from aggravating her leg. It necessitates removal of her prosthetic, which she holds against her chest under the circle of her right arm, her head on Max’s thigh, his hand resting carefully on her shoulder over the blanket. She stares at the cab until dawn.

None of the food they brought needs to be cooked or preserved, but she insists on getting up and checking that nothing has miraculously spoiled overnight because it gives her an excuse to test the limits of her leg: standing, walking, kneeling, stretching. Everything that involves lifting her knee relative to her hip makes the injury scream, unless she sits and doesn’t move, whereupon it merely burns for the act of sitting, and then subsides to its regular vicious, dull aching until she shifts her balance and sets it off again. Walking is not particularly fun, but is bearable if she maintains a stiff-legged hobble.

After they eat, she goes out to the cab, attacks one of the poles that they improvised the bumper out of with the boltcutters that she threw in the cab on a whim, and makes herself a walking stick. It’s better than nothing.

***

She can still walk at the end of the day. Which is good, because that is when the bomb-setters find them.

They appear at the cliff-tops on dirt bikes and small four-wheeled vehicles with fat tires and open backs. Furiosa and Max hear them less than a minute before they see them peering over the edges of the cliffs, and sit very still after they disappear, trying to track the sound of their engines. Furiosa counted eight vehicles and ten bodies, and they only stayed long enough to observe that they had two stranded wastelanders with a very large tanker trapped in their canyon.

She doesn’t pretend that she’s capable of sleep that night. Instead she spreads her blanket under the tanker and sets up a box of bean paste as a stand for her rifle. Max lies next to her on the blanket, stacking their guns and ammo in neat parallel rows. When his fidgeting gets to be too much, she takes his hand and holds it until he stills.

The bomb-setters come back at dawn. All ten of them.

Their leader is on one of the bikes, decked out in gold and red leather, wearing golden boots with enormous spiked wheels attached to the heels that jingle and spin when they swing their leg over the bike. They’re wearing goggles and have a scarf the color of dried blood wrapped around their face. They fold their arms across their chest and tilt their head downwards just a fraction to peer under the tanker, and Furiosa knows they’re staring at her.

She squeezes Max’s hand, then lets go to center her rifle on those goggles.

The scarf gets pulled down with one red-gloved hand. The skin underneath is the color of a sunbaked desert. “That’s quite unnecessary,” says a cold, dignified voice. The goggles go next, and the scarf is stripped away to reveal a wind-burned face and tangled black hair shot through with silver. “I’ve no need to hurt another woman.” A golden revolver appears, trained on Max.

When Furiosa doesn’t move, three more of the bomb-setters set hands on their pistols.

Their leader sighs. “There aren’t many women with metal arms out here, Imperator. What’s in the tank?”

Furiosa steadies the rifle against her prosthetic. “Water.”

The bomb-setters rustle and swap glances. Max twitches his hands towards one of the shotguns.

“Excellent,” says the head bomb-setter. “For the tank and the meatsack, we’ll trade you a well-supplied bike to get wherever it is that a famous Imperator needs to be getting.” She smiles benevolently.

“You can have the tanker,” Furiosa says. “I keep my meatsack.”

“What’ll you do? Kill him? After a fair trial? Shit, do it here and we’ll take the corpse.”

“No.”

The bomb-setter sighs, more dramatically this time. “Girl, we don’t have much food out here. Not like your pretty green palace. So you’ll let us fill our bellies with your prisoner, or we’ll be roasting both of you.”

Furiosa stuffs a bullet through her eye before she’s finished closing her mouth around “you.” It spits brain matter over the bomb-setter on the bike behind her as Furiosa grabs two pistols in her right hand and her rifle in her left and rolls through the dirt until she’s behind a wheel on the other side of the tanker. A bullet zips so close it almost ricochets off her prosthetic. She looks to her left and sees Max behind the other set of wheels with a shotgun and pistol of his own, staring at her with wide eyes.

“Don’t shoot the tank!”

“Get them out of there!”

The first one through gets thrown or jumps onto the side of the tanker and climbs over the top, but Furiosa hears him coming and blows the top of his skull off as soon as he pokes his nose over the edge. He slumps in place, head lolling forwards, blood spilling down the side of the tanker.

They send four the next time. They get themselves onto the side of the tanker one at a time, and then come over the top in a single wave. Furiosa almost hits one of them in the heart, but the bullet must get lost somewhere in breast tissue because the woman yanks out a bone-handled knife and drops almost directly on top of her. Furiosa shoves the butt of the rifle into her ribcage to knock the wind out of her, feels a bullet puncture the air an inch in front of her eyes, gets kicked in her bad thigh, scrambles to her feet, stomps on the woman’s hand until she drops her pistol, follows her as she tries to lunge away, and breaks her neck with one sharp twist from behind.

There are two people on Max, and a third pointing a shotgun at her.

Furiosa drops as they pull the trigger and feels steel balls graze bloody furrows across the top of her head while she scrabbles for one of her pistols. She’s up again in an instant and bolts away down the canyon so that they have to spin to track her and waste a shot into the air between them. Then she plants one slug in their throat and another in their forehead.

She’s most of the way down the canyon now, can barely put weight on her right leg, and can’t see much of anything besides the pink of the sky and the black shadow of the tanker. But she can hear grunts coming out of that shadow; she can hear metal striking flesh. Furiosa takes one step and catches a flash of motion in her peripheral vision: a human high up on the cliff-top wielding something shiny.

A glowing white spear appears between her and Max, and she squeezes her eyes shut and drops to her knees before her world becomes a glowing white hell.

Her hearing is buried under a mountain of ringing bells that bear down on her skull and threaten to pop her eyes from her sockets. She gasps, lungs empty, and feels tears run down her seared cheeks when burning air rushes through her throat. Shrapnel has scoured her arms and sliced open her left cheekbone, the wounds already baked raw, nerve endings singed.

There’s a smoking crater a meter across in the middle of the canyon now. She was a solid eight or ten meters away, and feels like every single part of her body has been cooked over an open fire. She can’t hear, and she can’t tell if anyone is moving in the tanker’s shadow. But she can see the person on the top of the cliff peering through binoculars, checking if they need to fire off another round. There’s no red or gold on them, just a bright rust color that would blend well with the rocks. Furiosa has the distinct feeling that they’re not with the bomb-setters, which is confirmed when they heave an enormous tube onto their shoulder, stuff another spear into it, and fire onto the desert side of the tanker.

The fireball doesn’t touch Furiosa, but she cowers from its heat all the same. She feels the ground shudder as the blast knocks loose more boulders that strike more hidden bombs. The entire chain of mountains must feel it; it’s a wonder they don’t implode from the shaking.  So Furiosa covers her head with her arms and waits for it to end.

***

She doesn’t know how long it takes for the ringing in her ears to begin to fade. As soon as she can hear more than that single shrill pitch – the wind, she can hear the wind now – she lifts her head to look for the figure on the cliff. She doesn’t see them. But, lying flat on her stomach, she can see under the tanker and watch a kneeling shadow with a long cylinder strapped to its back looting the bodies of the bomb-setters who did not enter the canyon. The sun has risen enough to cast light across the top of the tanker. Deep in the shadowy pit of the canyon, Furiosa is invisible to them.

She whimpers when she tries to stand. Her knee gives out after the first step, so she belly-crawls over to the wall of the canyon, moving only when the wind is rushing so loudly that she can’t hear the grate of her clothes over the sand. The ringing hasn’t stopped when she reaches the wall, but it is dimming faster. She scrapes at the stone with her bare hand until her fingers catch a ledge, and then she does the same with her prosthetic, hauling herself all the way up to her feet. With the wall as her crutch, she limps towards the tanker.

The contrast between the shadows of the cliffs and the light rebounding off the tanker hurts her eyes and interferes with her ability to see the corpses sprawled across the floor of the canyon. She can’t tell how many there are, or if one is Max. There were still two bomb-setters on him when the first rocket struck.

Max is probably dead. Which leaves Furiosa with one good leg, scraping and abusing her prosthetic to stay on her feet, trying to reach a rifle that may or may not still work after two close-proximity rocket strikes so that she can kill the launcher of those rockets, take one of the bikes that hopefully still works, and ride for a day to reach the Rock Riders without getting blown up so she can tell them about this tanker of water that is the Citadel’s peace offering and plea for aid so that they will not be engulfed by an army of religious fanatics who want to burn to the ground everything that Furiosa has watched her girls create.

There are guns scattered about between the corpses. She almost stops to pick up a revolver, but realizes that once she gets off her feet, she isn’t going to be on them again for a while. She is close enough to the tanker that she can see her rifle on the ground next to the wheel. The corpse of the first bomb-setter is still sprawled across the top of the tanker, the beginning of a bloody stroke painted down across the metal.

Furiosa sinks slowly to her knees, and then onto her stomach again, and crawls towards her rifle. One of the wires from the piano has snapped and keeps snagging on what’s left of her forearm, grating against the scorched skin. But she can still hold her rifle.

She can’t crawl very well with it, but she also can’t hit anything from her current position. So Furiosa shuts her eyes, breathes an apology to the gun, plants the butt of it in the dirt, shoves herself to her feet, and hobbles the last few meters to where the hitch of the tanker is crushed against the wall. She sits carefully on the shadowed side of it, and swings her left leg over. Then she cradles her rifle against her chest and lifts her right knee. The pain makes her inhale sharply, before she realizes that she can hear the sounds of rummaging and body-looting. And she can hear them stop.

Footsteps start moving towards her.

Furiosa braces her rifle against her shoulder.

The footsteps halt just out of sight around the curve of the tanker.

Furiosa breathes.

“What we have here is some filthy, sour earth, boys and girls,” says a drawling man’s voice. Then a carbon copy of Max’s giant knife lunges around the corner at her.

He couldn’t see Furiosa any better than she could see him, so the lunge goes wide, but she also now has a long-barreled rifle in a very close-quarters combat situation against a knife. So she wields the rifle like a badly-made club and broadsides him in the face with the barrel and scope, then launches her center of balance backwards over the hitch of the trailer and hits the dirt on the other side. That knife with the bone handle is just out of reach of her prosthetic; she grabs it as the northerner leaps over the hitch.

Furiosa is on the ground, on her back, knife hooked into her metal fingers. She rolls to her right as the northerner comes down on top of her, and jams the knife in under his ribs. It’s a needle-pointed blade that shears away when he screams and lurches off of her, leaving her a hand’s breadth of jagged metal. She rolls onto her back again and gets three-fourths of a massive knife buried in her bad leg.

Furiosa and the northerner stare at each other for an entire second.

He starts to twist the knife in her leg. She puts hers through one of his bright blue eyes. He lets go of the knife, and she can’t move her leg, but she can grip sandy blond hair in her human fist and stab him again: in his other eye, in the throat. When the blade gets caught between his vertebrae and jerks out of her grip, she pounds at his skull with her metal fist until his bone structure hooks on one of her fingers, ripping it free of her hand. She lets go. The northerner slumps over backwards, gurgling and fountaining a final gout of arterial blood into the air.

Furiosa drops the bone knife, and wrenches air into her lungs, then looks down at the one in her leg and passes out.

***

“Furiosa – Fury. Furiosa. Hey, hey.”

There are hands on her face, shaking and stroking and cradling. She tries to focus on those over the fire consuming the rest of her body, and opens her eyes.

Max looks like he’s been hit in the face with a crowbar. The cut on his hairline has reopened, and either the rocket blast or a bomb-setters knife opened up a slice along his jaw. A significant portion of his face is going to have bruises on it within hours.

But he’s alive.                                                                 

He cups his palm over her undamaged cheek. “Hey.”

Furiosa tries to smile. “Hey.”

“You pretty messed up, Fury.” His thumb brushes over her skin.

“I know.” She tries to lift her head to look down the length of her body, recognizes the knife still buried in her leg, and winces. “I’m gonna need you to get that out.”

Max starts to reach for the handle, then stops and looks at her. “That’s military.”

“I know. He was talking about sour earth. I assumed he was northern.”

Max’s face twists up, and he drops his hand from her cheek to twine their fingers together while she lets her head rest back into the dirt. “I am so, so sorry,” he mumbles, and wraps his fist around the hilt.

The edges of Furiosa’s vision go black when he yanks the knife out. She stares at it as hard as she can, at her own blood sliding off of it, suspended in the air, and can’t think of anything else in the world that might be more important. Then Max tosses it to the side and the trance shatters.

He squeezes her hand. “I’ll be right back,” he promises and leaves her gasping and shuddering and bleeding. The shrapnel tracks on her arms and shot streaks across her skull are full of sand, but they hurt a great deal less than the holes in her leg, so she tries to concentrate on them. Max reappears at her side clutching their blanket and what’s left of their medical kit.

“How bad?” she hears herself ask.

“Missed the artery and bone,” he says. His hand flickers to her shoulder. “Can you sit?”

Furiosa closes her eyes and nods, letting him help her sit up while trying to minimize the movement of her leg.

When Max sees the marks from the shotgun blast and realizes that most of the blood on her head has, in fact, come out of her body, a soft “Oh” leaves his lungs.

Furiosa grips his knee. “Worry about the leg.”

Max looks at her hand, then into her eyes. “No dying.”

She grimaces. “No promises.”

Max’s mouth firms up into a thin line. “Please?”

Furiosa huffs. “Nice try,” she murmurs.

Max shrugs one shoulder and turns his face away while he pours water over a loose scrap of cloth that he then hands to her.

She takes it in her right hand and starts wiping grit away from the cut on her cheek and grazes across her skull. Most of her shirt has the northerner’s blood caking onto it to the point where she doesn’t waste energy worrying about decency; she pulls off what’s left of her prosthetic, yanks off the shirt, and starts wiping the worst of the blood off of her skin. The cloth binding her chest is speckled, but not soaked, so she leaves it alone. When she feels a little cleaner, she touches Max’s shoulder as he’s rummaging through the kit. “Still have your knife?”

He nods.

She points at her leg. “This needs to get out of the way. I can restitch it later, but it’s not helping me now.”

Max frowns. “Have to lift your leg.”

“Fine,” Furiosa says, and draws up her knee so that she doesn’t have time to think about it. She bites her tongue and almost screams, but braces her heel in the dirt and lets herself shudder through the pain. The knife went in almost vertically, mostly parallel with the fibers of her muscle instead of cutting across them, but knowing it _could_ hurt _more_ doesn’t _actually_ make it hurt _less_.

Max moves quickly, unwinding the bandage and cutting through the remaining cloth at the hole that marks the site of her initial injury, about a third of the way down her thigh. The knife is poorly shaped for the task, but does the job. He cuts across, then down the outside seam before handing her the knife and pulling the fabric taut so she can awkwardly work the blade up the inside with her right hand. Blood is smeared across her skin and highlighting the fine hairs that grow thick on her legs.

Max starts fussing with the bottle of alcohol as she finishes, but looks at her when she clears her throat.

“You remember what the Rock Rider’s pass looks like?”

He shakes his head, says “You’ll have to show me,” and sets her leg on fire.

“Better remember,” she grunts through the burn. “It’s a day’s ride north. There may be more hidden bombs; keep out in the desert a ways. Bring my arm – they should believe it’s mine-”

“ _No_ ,” Max says, setting down the bottle. He curls his hand around the back of her neck and presses their foreheads together. “You do it.”

Furiosa closes her eyes and kisses him. It’s soft and strange and makes her head spin when she leans back again. “If this kills me-”

Max lets go of her neck to stab a finger at her face and glare. “No dying.”

Furiosa sighs. “Give me the bandages.”

Max hands them to her with his mouth pursed, forehead crinkled in thought.

The knife gouge is fairly close to her original injury, so she binds approximately the same area of her leg as the last time. It’s a paltry way to care for a wound of that size. Max shifts behind her with a fresh cloth to trickle more alcohol over the back of her head, which is an outright relief compared to what came before. Then he squeezes her shoulder and slips away to the other side of the tanker while she deals with the scores on her arms, pinning down the cloth with her stub to clean the ones on her right forearm.

A muffled rumble floats back to her as she finishes checking herself over. It moves from one end of the trailer to the other, then cuts off moments before Max reappears, hopping over the trailer hitch and the northerner’s corpse.

“Four-wheeled one works,” he announces. “It’s slow, but it runs.” He crouches in front of her. “You’re not dying, Fury.”

Furiosa tries to smile. “Help me up.”

Walking the two meters to the trailer hitch would be the most painful thing she does that day, but then she has to stop leaning on Max and slide herself across to the other side.  Max maneuvers the four-wheeler around so she can crawl directly onto the open space in the back that allows keep her leg extended as much as possible, leaving her in private to collect herself while he criss-crosses the boundary between canyon and desert to collect their supplies and raid the corpses for extra items that he stacks around her and under the seats. When he finishes that, he strips off his shirt and hands it to her (“The sun,” he says, and stabs a finger pointedly into the sky when she tries to tell him he’s being ridiculous, so she rolls her eyes and pulls it over her head) before re-donning his jacket and climbing into the front seat.

The initial grumble of the engine shoots a twinge through Furiosa’s leg, but she finds a slightly better angle to rest her feet and orders her brain to ignore it. Max steers them clear of the canyon, far enough into the desert to miss any hidden bombs, and points them north. Furiosa gets herself to an angle where she can rest her arm against the back of the passenger seat and have her fingertips brushing Max’s shoulder, and then she kind of closes her eyes and goes out of her body for a little while, to someplace quieter and less battered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In honor of all the recent Fallout 4 announcements, I wanted to throw in a reference to all the things that go boom in those wonderful, wonderful games. Unfortunately, most IRL equivalents of a Fat Man or shoulder-mounted missile launcher would have vaporized Furiosa, Max, and possibly the tanker, so I had to settle for the (relatively) wimpy cousin, the rocket-propelled grenade. At least they don't have to worry about deathclaws?


	6. Take This Banner, Hang it Upside-Down

It’s dark and they’re not moving. She can see stars. The four-wheeler is tucked into the folds of a mountain, all but invisible to someone peering in from the desert. Max isn’t in the front seat. Something is rustling outside of her vision.

Furiosa sits up straighter, straining to listen. “Fool?”

The rustling gives way to footsteps padding around the corner of the cliff that’s standing between the four-wheeler and the desert. Max throws up his hands when he comes into view and realizes that Furiosa has a pistol aimed at him, even as she’s lowering it, recognizing the jagged bulk of his jacket. “Easy,” he says. “Went to take a piss.”

Furiosa’s mouth twitches. “Where are we?”

“Next to the pass. Thought we could stand to wait for morning before knocking.”

Furiosa sets the pistol aside while Max closes the distance between them. “I knew you remembered.”

Max shrugs. He sets his left foot against the edge of the driver’s seat and leans forward, stretching out the muscles. “Wasn’t going to leave you, Fury,” he tells the sky.

“I know,” Furiosa says, surprised that she believes herself. She pulls her prosthetic into her lap. “Why do you call me that?”

Max switches legs. “First time I heard your name was… hanging, chained, fueling War Boys.” He mimics a younger, more frantic voice: “Treason! Betrayal! Imperator gone rogue!”

Furiosa grins.

“Knew you wouldn’t stop,” Max continues. “Knew you’d try to kill me.” He pulls back his foot but stays leaning forward with his arms braced on the seat. “Still better than anyone else in that pit. Different person than they thought you were.”

“If you’d brought a working gun, you’d be a corpse.”

Max nods with most of his body. “That child calls you Fury, and I’d wager she’s never seen you kill.” He leaves it at that, climbs all the way into the front again to stretch his legs across the seats. “Thought you were dead in that canyon” he says to the hands that he folds in his lap.

“I thought _you_ were dead,” Furiosa retorts. “That rocket almost went off on top of you.”

Max picks at the scab on his jaw and doesn’t look at her, but he holds out his free hand and lets their fingers tangle.

Furiosa’s chest hurts. “Do I have to be dying before you show emotion?” She tries to make it joking. Feels it fall flat.

Max just shakes his head.

She squeezes his hand. “Hey. Max.”

He looks up and stabs a finger at her. “First time you said my name was in the crashed cab. When you thought _I_ was dead.”

Furiosa raises her eyebrows. “You’re only saying mine because my leg is going to get infected and kill me.”

“No it’s not.” Max scowls like brute force of will can save her.

She has to smile. “Fool,” she murmurs, then leans towards him, spurring a twinge in her leg. “If I don’t get home, give Toast my rifle. She needs a better gun.”

Max touches her face with the fingertips of his free hand. It’s not an answer, because refusing to give one is the closest he’s going to get to denying her when death is bearing down like a freight train.

 Furiosa closes her eyes while he traces the cut on her cheek, following it into the curve of her hairline, down to her jaw. His fingers hook under the tip of her chin. She feels him leaning in between the seats, and he kisses her carefully, cautiously, like he’s waiting for her to punch him. She smiles a little at the realization, brushes her thumb across his hand, and Max sighs cripplingly.

When he sits back, she clears her throat. “Do something useful with my arm.”

Max looks only at her.

“It won’t be tonight,” she admits. “It might be tomorrow, probably the next day. Maybe ten thousand days. But… the gun. And the arm. Please.”

Hesitantly, with the tiniest of motions, Max nods. He lets go of her chin, so she kisses him again until he puts it back. It’s better than the time in the canyon, when they were both shell-shocked and freshly not-dead. She might be dead soon, but there has been a possibility that she will be dead soon for more than eight thousand days. She has two holes in her leg and Max’s shirt hanging slack from her shoulders, and he reaches for her again, thumbing over the gashes on her head and the welted brand on her neck, hands knotted tight around each other. She can have this.

***

Max finishes the night sleeping across the front seats in an uncomfortable-looking ball of leather and dust.

Shortly before dawn, Furiosa goes on an adventure that entails climbing out of the four-wheeler’s bed, finding her improvised walking stick, and hobbling a reasonable distance away so she can work out the logistics of relieving herself. Then she has to get back. Something unpleasant has found her leg and is making it redden and swell, and every twitch of the muscle spikes her nerves.

Max is sitting up by the time she returns. “You should sit in front.”

The Rock Riders will be studying for signs of weakness. A bloodstained bandage on her leg isn’t going to help, but you don’t need working legs to shoot a rifle. As it is, her boots go up to her knees, and so much sand has been plastered onto her body that someone standing at a distance may not notice the dark brown splash and the swelling around it. Or it will be the only thing they notice.

The glass of her rifle’s scope is cracked from being beaten against the northerner’s skull, and they’re too close to the Rock Riders to risk a test-fire, but she can still bluff with it if she needs to. Her arm is also in need of repairs, but she buckles it on anyway. She tucks pistols into both of her boots and stuffs a shotgun under her seat so she can balance the rifle across her thighs.

Max stashes pistols inside his jacket and also straps a pair onto his legs before he starts the engine.

They really are only minutes from the entrance to the Rock Rider’s pass. The crashing of the war rig and destruction of the war parties took a toll on the infrastructure of the pass, widening the ground and turning parts of the cliff-sides into steep hills. Two or three cars could drive side-by-side through most of the pass, if not for the scattered wreckage of so many vehicles. Furiosa spots the Doof Warrior’s guitar dangling from the remnants of his wall of speakers seconds before they reach that widest point which is the Rock Riders’ base of operations.

Furiosa counts three dozen Riders at a camp high on the mountainside. They throw themselves onto bikes with a chorus of shouts, and rip out of sight two hundred meters in the air to reappear at ground level with a speed that makes Furiosa flinch for her rifle.

There has been a regime change. Everywhere has had a regime change. The first Rider out to meet them is a woman: she broadcasts it with every aspect of her speech and movements without removing a single layer of the leather or cloth that binds her from crown to foot. She may have taken her goggles off the old leader’s corpse; Furiosa can’t tell. “You reek of bad luck, Imperator,” she calls. “Who’s been poking holes in you?”

Furiosa shifts her knee to dump a fresh round of adrenaline through her veins. “There’s a crashed tanker a day’s ride south of here. Three thousand gallons of water. A peace offering. And we want to make a deal.”

“That’s cannibal territory,” a member of the Rider entourage says. “The ones with the bombs.”

“There’s a crowd of corpses there, too.”

“You have a reputation as a liar amongst our people,” the Rock Rider informs her. “What would we do with a wrecked tanker in hostile land?”

“The tanker is intact; the cab is in a pit left by one of their bombs. Get a couple bikes with winches, you can haul it out, rig together the hitch, and take it anywhere.”

The lead Rock Rider looks over her shoulder. “First ten Riders packed and ready get to take a trip.” Then she guns her bike up and parks it an arm’s reach away from Furiosa. She yanks out a pistol and trains it on Furiosa’s right eye. “Alright, Imperator. You’re going to put down that rifle, your friend is going to let go of _both_ of those… good boy. And we’re going to talk about why you two suicidal fools rolled into our canyon to tell us about a tanker. I assume it has something to do with all that blood.” Her goggles tilt towards Furiosa’s leg, then snap upwards when she sets the rifle aside.

Furiosa grimaces. “An army of cultists is coming out of the north. They want to reave a track across the wastes; they’ll start with the Citadel, then spread east and south. They got into an old military base; one found us while we were dealing with the cannibals. He had some kind of rocket launcher. Setting one off in here would collapse half your mountain.”

The Rider scoffs. “You know how long we’ve lived here? How many war parties we’ve seen? We’ll drop some grenades on them, they’ll go home to lick their wounds and leave us alone, if they ever decide to wander this way in the first place.

Furiosa feels Max twitching at her back. He clears his throat. “They come out of a dead city. Ten thousand, maybe more. They’ll get here.”

When the Rock Rider doesn’t respond, Furiosa picks up the threat of the argument: “If you want to live and die like roaches in a hole, grab the tanker, stash it somewhere, and hide when the northerners come. If you want something else for your people, something that’s not fear-piss and hiding in shadows, come to the Citadel. We’ll feed and shelter every one of you until the northerners get here. All you have to do is fight alongside us.”

The pistol vanishes. “If you’re a liar, you’re a stupid, sun-stroked one.” The Rock Rider lets rip with her horn, triggering a swarm of bikes up the canyon towards them. “Show us this tanker.”

***

The four-wheeler is not as fast as the bikes, but Max pushes it to the limit for the ride back to the tanker, burning Guzzoline hard while sweats and shivers spur tremors through Furiosa’s body. She’s conscious for most of the trip – always aware of the Rock Riders flanking them, watching for any sign that they’ve been tricked – but her brain will freeze images in place for seconds or minutes at a time, shimmering at the edges. She keeps seeing the same mountain in the same position until she blinks and realizes that they’ve passed it.

They keep well out into the desert, occasionally passing ditches carved by hidden bombs that grow more numerous as they approach their target. When the shadow of the cab and the gleam of light off the tanker become visible a little before sunset, half the Riders tear off ahead to secure the canyon, whooping and cascading over the dunes.

The corpses have scarcely begun to rot.

Max stops the four-wheeler midway between the cab and tanker and looks at Furiosa for the first time since dawn. “Leg?”

“Not good.”

His face closes up.

“Where’s this northerner with the rockets, Imperator?” demands the head Rock Rider.

Furiosa turns her face towards her. “Other side of the tanker. By the hitch.”

The Rider strips off her helmet and goggles so Furiosa can see her frown. She has skin like Yabby: so dark she seems to be a living shadow. She also has a beard of intricately braided black hair that had been tucked away under her jacket, but which she now pulls free. The end of the braid reaches the middle of her torso.

“Nada! They got the one with the boots!” The shout comes from one of her lieutenants. Those giant golden wheels jingle merrily as they’re hoisted above the Rock Rider’s head.

“Nada?” Furiosa repeats.

“Old word from an old world. Means ‘nothing’.” Nada swipes encrusted dirt away from the edges of her goggles. “I was born a year after the war. Guess you can figure what my mama expected for me. It’s just another name in these times.” She tugs on her beard. “Now, me and your friend are going to stroll over to see this northern corpse, and… Amí. Amí! Keep a gun on the Imperator until I come back.” She beckons three fingers at Max, who slowly climbs out of the four-wheeler and starts walking towards the tanker while she follows with her pistol propped casually against the back of his skull.

A Rider who must be Amí guns their bike into Furiosa’s line of sight to Max and Nada. They prop one foot up against their handlebars and center the bomb-setter’s golden revolver on Furiosa’s nose. “That story about the north true?”

“I sure didn’t stab myself in the leg,” Furiosa snaps. She can feel the flesh starting to boil itself, and hopes she’s imagining the smell.

Amí shrugs. “I heard you cut your own arm off. That one true?” They keep their tone conversational.

“No, no,” says the Rock Rider who took the boots. They brandish one for emphasis. “Some bastard chopped it off, and she beat him to death with it.”

“She lost it in some gnarled-up crash, didn’t she?” asks one of the others, pausing from stripping bullet belts off of corpses.

“I’m trying to get an answer, you _lugheads_ ,” Amí roars. “Shut your faces for a breath.”

Furiosa exhales as a spate of dizziness rocks her bones. “There was a fight, and there was a crash. Trade mission gone bad, six or seven thousand days ago. It ended with my arm under half a car, and the only people around for hours were Buzzards. Had to cut it off and drive myself back to the Citadel.”

“If that’s true, I’ll cut off my _own_ arm and eat it,” Amí says. A rocket soars behind their head, out into the desert, tracing a parabola that curves gently downwards until it hits the sand and detonates.

Nada cackles at the size of the fireball. She’s standing next to the tanker, launcher braced against her shoulder while Max finishes flinching and returns to looking deeply disgruntled. “This will be a lovely beast to ride against, Imperator.” She sets down the tube and waves Amí’s gun away. “When these northerners coming?”

Furiosa shrugs. “Sooner than later.”

“Do we have ten days? Twenty?”

“Probably. May be one or two moon cycles.”

Nada nods. “We’ll need some time to talk and prep for a trip, but if your sentries and snipers see a green flare from our horizon… that means “don’t shoot”. If the single most jug-headed galah we have gets shot off his bike, the rest of us turn around, and you fight these rocket-shooters alone.

Furiosa holds out her right hand, and Nada stalks past Amí to smack a leather-wrapped palm into it. “Done.”

***

After that, they drive west. Furiosa stays in the passenger seat. She can’t stop shaking after a couple hours of darkness, even with Max’s shirt and the blanket wrapped tight around her. Come dawn, she’s sweating, still shivering, and keeps forgetting that Max has a hand on her knee, gripping with white knuckles. She can’t feel much of anything besides festering pain.

“Rifle,” she rasps.

Max lets go of her knee – he was holding her, right – and digs up the gun from the back without taking his eyes off the dunes that he’s winding between. Sparing her leg? The undercarriage? She can’t think.

The rifle is warm from hours in the sun. She clutches it against her chest. The barrel pressed against her cheek becomes a grounding point of smooth metal. She needs to clean it. She should do that soon.

“Hold on, Fury,” Max murmurs. He squeezes her shoulder and hauls the wheel to the right. The four-wheeler lurches and bumps up onto the road between Gas Town and the Citadel.

She must pass out again because the next thing she sees is the towers of the Citadel charging towards them. They’re less than a kilometer away.

“Max?”

He looks at her.

“Thanks.”

He shakes his head. “All you.”

A shadow falls over them as they thread between the buttes. Furiosa’s vision blurs when she tilts her head, then refocuses when she keeps gazing upwards. She sees faces peering from the mouth of the skull, hands cupped around eyes and mouths, binoculars and telescopes trained on her leg.

Max takes them straight into the lower garage. “Get a stretcher; she’s hurt,” he orders the first mechanic who looks at them, and five people drop what they’re doing to bolt from the room. Max sits back and turns to her, cupping her head with one hand, stroking over her cheek with the other. “Stay with us.” His voice is almost too quiet to hear. “We still need you.”

Furiosa sees Yabby and Cab over his shoulder, forcing their way through the onlookers like a pair of battle tanks. “Tell them about the green flare.”

He hesitates, then nods when the women reach her side of the vehicle, stretcher balanced between them.

“What’s up, boss?” Cab asks cheerfully. “Leg trouble?”

“Something like that.” Furiosa feels Max’s hands drop from her face – her vision whites out as she turns her body sideways, but she keeps moving anyway, shoving herself out of the four-wheeler until Cab grabs her shoulders and Yabby catches her at the knees and makes her hiss. They lower her onto the stretcher as her vision creeps back through the fog.

Lying flat is the best sensation she’s had in her entire life because it reduces the pain by a miniscule amount instead of ratcheting it up higher. That’s before they pick her up, when every jostle and bump becomes a fresh stab. But Furiosa stares up at the rough rock ceilings and hazy lamps, listens to the sound of a thousand people at home, and breathes damp air that doesn’t drag sand into her lungs, and feels a little less like dying. A soft hand folds into her limp one, and she turns her head.

It’s Sapling with an intense frown worked into her tiny face, running to keep pace with Yabby and Cab’s freight train momentum. “You got hurt, Auntie,” she pouts between breaths.

Furiosa tries to smile. “I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short chapter, but I finally got to bring in my favorite non-Citadel group: the perpetual teenagers on dirt bikes.


	7. Charon's River

Furiosa doesn’t remember much of her first days back in the Citadel. She fades in and out a lot. They put her in the library, away from the noise and contamination of the Organic Mechanic’s old chop-shop. The Dag smears strange, foul-smelling salves onto her leg until they stop being fragrant compared to the reek of her wounds. There’s something involving a hot knife at a couple points. Cheedo plays piano sometimes. Other times, Max sits next to her with a tube of red connecting their arms and listens while Sapling recites a hundred stories that she has heard a hundred times. One day, Furiosa hears Max muttering about rifle scopes, and Toast’s voice answering. Toast and Capable both talk to the others about the council and generalized politics.

Capable is in the middle of one such documentation about Gas Town when Furiosa’s brain remembers that there’s an army coming. “Did you tell them?” she asks the vaulted ceiling.

Capable cuts off mid-word. “Furiosa?”

“The flare.” Her brain beats dust out of a couple vents. “And the north-man.” She turns her head, scanning for Max. He isn’t there.

“We heard about all of it.” Capable appears in her field of vision, face crinkled in a smile. “How do you feel?”

“Stiff.” Furiosa shoves herself up on her right arm. She’s on a mattress: a real, honest, confusingly soft mattress. She’s still wearing Max’s shirt, but her boots and bloody, chopped-up pants are gone. One of the girls has been in her room, though, because her pants have been replaced with ones made of a loose, black mesh fabric that feels somewhere between plastic and cloth and goes down to her knees. She has a fuzzy memory of taking them off a corpse. The right leg is rolled up to expose a thick, knobby scab where the door handle tore into her, and a line of neat black stitches closing the puncture where she was stabbed. The shrapnel tracks on her arms have faded to scars.

She brushes her fingertips over the stitches. “How long has it been?”

“Six days,” Capable murmurs.

After killing Joe, she was only out for two.

“Can I walk?”

“You should use a stick for a while.” The Dag enters the room with a pot of tea in her hands and Cheedo and Sapling at her heels. “That knife went clean through your muscle. You’ll only get back full use of the leg if you give it the time to recover.” She kneels to set the teapot on a table and sends Sapling dashing for cups.

“We caught a Buzzard,” Cheedo pipes up. “We had to find a translator, though, so they don’t know anything yet.”

The Dag lays a hand on her hip. “One thing at a time, love. She just woke up.”

“No, it’s fine.” Furiosa scrubs at her hair, which is longer than she remembers. “Do we trust the translator? Where did they come from?”

The girls share a glance.

“It’s Polly,” Cheedo says. “The Milking Mother. We’ve been trying to convince her that this is a good idea.”

Furiosa blinks. “Polly is a Buzzard?”

“She’s certainly mean enough for it.” The Dag shrugs.

Capable sets her hand on Furiosa’s shoulder. “We were hoping you could talk to her.”

“I can’t force her. I won’t.”

Cheedo keels next to the teapot. “But you almost died to get us the Rock Riders. If you can do that, she can talk to a chained captive. And then we’ll be able to _fight_.” She curls trembling fingers around the handle. “Please, Furiosa.”

Capable pats her shoulder. “You still need rest. But in a day or two…”

“No,” Furiosa says. “I’ll talk to her.” She bends her right knee and is pleasantly surprised to receive a vicious ache instead of screaming agony. “Where is she?”

“High gardens. I’ll go with you.” Cheedo stands as Sapling rushes back into the room with a tray of cups that she promptly abandons on the tabletop. When Furiosa swings off the bed and winces as her leg tries to bear weight, Cheedo lunges to the side to grab something long and thin. “Here – Max made it for you.” She hands Furiosa a length of hollow steel pipe that has a square foot-piece of black rubber at one end. At the other is an L of leather-wrapped wood that can be gripped vertically or horizontally.

Furiosa takes the cane and runs her fingers over the grips, studying where it connects to the steel. The top grip – the horizontal one – has several loops of slack leather that she can slide her left forearm through if she’s standing still, keeping her weight off her right leg. There’s also a small hole cut into the metal near the border with the wood that has a tiny stub pushing through it, like a button. On a guess, she wraps her hand around the vertical grip and presses the button down with her thumb. The steel tube clatters to the floor to reveal a knife that’s sturdy enough to crack bone.

“Leave it to him,” the Dag mutters.

Without her prosthetic, Furiosa has to let Cheedo pick up the tube, which she then holds between her knees so she can slide the knife back into its hiding spot. Her boots are under the bed, and take a minute’s work to pull over her calves. Then she grips the cane in her right hand, shoves her weight onto it, and leads the way up to the gardens.

***

Sapling tears away as soon as they reach the open air. Cheedo follows her once they spot Polly parked in a shaded corner between boulders, sanding down the handle of a hoe so it doesn’t rip someone’s hand open. She squeezes Furiosa’s shoulder before she goes, and murmurs something that was probably meant as encouragement.

Furiosa is slow in her approach, takes her time to study the patchwork of plants and workers spaced across the uneven top of the butte. A number of paler War Boys still wear white paint to protect their skin from the sun; ex-Wretched tend to layer on every scrap of cloth they can find. Many of the Milking Mothers still carry some of the bulk they had as slaves; they work uncompromisingly and without shame, compiling clothes from whatever is available.

Polly sees her coming, but doesn’t slow or pause her work. “The one-armed Imperator’s come to see the one-legged Buzzard, children” she calls loud enough for casual eavesdroppers to hear.

Furiosa limps closer, feeling a hundred eyes swivel towards her. “Not here for politics,” she grits.

“Forcing me to make a treaty for you is politics,” Polly assures her. “What happened to _your_ leg?”

“A northerner with a rocket launcher and a knife.” She reaches the table that Polly is working at and braces her stump against it. “They have scouts south-east of us – or did.”

Polly leans the hoe against the boulder behind her and picks up a shovel. “Buzzards are east.”

“So are Rock Riders. Had to get around them.”

“How brave and daring of you.” She starts scrubbing rust off the shovel head with a stiff-bristled brush. “If I would only stoop to do my small part for the preservation of our perfect society, everything would be okay.”

Furiosa exhales through her nose. “What do you want us to do?”

“I was a teenager when the War Boys caught me.” Polly doesn’t stop scrubbing. “My sister was driving. Her skull cracked when the car flipped, but she had enough brains left to get a gun barrel into her maw. I didn’t. Coward. So I’m not a Buzzard anymore, not really. Your prisoner isn’t, either, letting himself be caught.” She squints up at Furiosa. “Put a slug in his skull, dump his body for them to find, and I’ll write terms to leave with him. That’s the best chance you’ll get to make a deal.”

“What will you say?”

Polly shrugs. “There’s a fuck-off of an army coming, and when they see their dust in the north, they can let themselves get shredded or come up here and hope for a better death. That’s what you offered the Rock Riders, isn’t it?”

Furiosa nods.

“They won’t listen,” Polly promises.

“We’ll see.” Furiosa leans a little more on her cane to take some of the strain off her leg. “You have to kill the Buzzard.”

“Of course.” Polly lifts the brush away from the shovel, bristles stained with muddy red. “I’ll tell you where to dump him, too, so they find him before he’s rotten or buried in sand.”

***

Walking away from that conversation, Furiosa’s gaze lands on Sapling crouched next to a sturdy shadow that cannot be anyone but Max. They’re packing dirt into a hole around the roots of a newly-planted fruit tree while Cheedo supervises keeping the trunk upright. Furiosa leaves them to their sun and dirt and limps down to her quarters to find her arm.

The prosthetic is sitting on her workbench next to the medical kit and the blanket (folded in a neat square) from the water tanker. The arm is battered beyond functionality, so she hooks its straps over the grip of her cane, slings her tool belt around her waist, and heads for the main garage to look for spare parts.

There’s no such thing as a quiet corner, there, but Piker is working on her bike near a scrap heap and lets her share the space without forcing serious conversation. They talk about dealing with sand in engines and what parts might be useful as fingers on the prosthetic. When Furiosa needs an extra hand to thread together some wires inside the palm, Piker throws down her wrench before she’s finished hearing the question. It’s the easiest afternoon Furiosa has had in a long time. And at sunset, she has bloody fingertips and a metal hand that can grip her cane. She has to press extra padding into the cup to reduce the wear on her stump from the direct vertical force of supporting her weight, which will make for a tighter, less comfortable fit for a few days until the fibers compress under near-constant pressure. But she has two arms again.

She’s been sitting for so long that standing up makes her grit her teeth, but then she catches her balance with the cane, steadying herself so she can take a breath, and the pain drops away.

Piker walks with her to the mess hall. Furiosa is still slow – the rough floor doesn’t help – but she’s moving faster now that the cane is supporting her good side.

She eats at a table with Piker and the other mechanics, sitting down at one end with her cane leaning against the side of the table, not talking much, but listening to the tides of garage gossip and shop talk. The knowledge that she unilaterally sentenced a man to death so that these overgrown teenagers and rangy adults can keep eating with grease-smeared brows and unshackled hands tickles at her brain and keeps her sober.

Then a War Pup in the middle of a growth spurt says “We should put some of those Polecat rigs together. For the north-people.”

“We never had Polecats – that was Gas Town. But we got harpoon and plow trucks,” offers a brown-skinned, green-eyed Milking Mother two people down from Furiosa.

“I heard they got rockets, though,” says someone on the Mother’s other side.

The War Boy mechanic sitting across from Furiosa agrees: “Some of the snipers been saying they don’t want to sit watch ‘cause they’ll try to blow the tops off the mountains.”

“But there’s so many we’d see the dust of ‘em coming a day before.”

“If there’s _that_ many, a day’s warning does us no good.”

“Yeah,” says the first person who mentioned the rockets. “And if they got an army base, what if they have those old world flyers? What if they bomb us outta those? Old world people did that for their wars all the time, my momma told me. That’s how they killed it – their world.”

The table goes quiet. Piker shoots a wide-eyed glance at Furiosa.

Allowing herself one heavy exhale, Furiosa lays both of her hands palm-down on the table. “They don’t have flying machines. If they do, they don’t have the fuel to get them in the air. They have rockets, but I’ve seen them. They wouldn’t reach the tops of the mountains from the ground unless they were right at the base, and they’re not going to get close enough for that. We’re going to ride out to meet them. We have Rock Riders coming. We’ll get the Buzzards. And Gas Town and the Bullet Farm will ride with us.”

The War Pup stares at her. “What if we lose?”

“I’d rather die fighting like a starved rat hiding in the dark than be a slave again,” says the Milking Mother mechanic. “You never knew the worst parts of life before, child. But I’d kill myself before going back to that.” She spits over her shoulder.

The ex-Wretched at the table nod, and so do some of the War Boys. Heads at other tables are turning to watch and listen.

“There’s no Valhalla. There’s no great god. There’s just petty humans scrabblin’ in the dust. And no self-named prophet is going to take our green mountains while I’m still here to crack their skulls.” The Mother looks up and down the table. “They’ll die like any other people, there’s just more of them. But we got high walls and big guns to shoot them dead, so don’t be losing sleep and shitting your pants about them. You all hear me?”

“Yeah,” mutters the War Pup.

The rest of the hall is silent.

A Wretched at another table rises to her feet, scraggly black hair hanging around her face. “They’ll be corpses before they see the green.”

Furiosa turns her head and sees people nodding, murmuring to themselves.

A Milking Mother up at the serving counter beats her fist against the stone. “We’ll have no more kings, and no more vicious gods. We’re not going back!”

The general volume of the hall jumps from a murmur to a thunder in the space of a breath. Suddenly there are hands clapping and fists pounding, and people climbing onto the benches like they’re staring down death in that moment. “We’re not going back; we’re not going back. _We’re not going back_.”

Furiosa closes her eyes. A shiver of cold jolts down her limbs.

***

It takes some time for people to settle themselves, and many leave the hall in groups of five or more, chattering about harpoon guns, engine dynamics, boulder fortifications, plants that produce substances that could be used as weapons. Furiosa stays in her place at the table long after the mechanics have scattered to raid the stocks of nitro and begin tweaking every engine they can get their hands on. She’s still staring at her empty plate when Max sits down across from her.

“You woke up,” he says mildly.

Furiosa nods. She touches the cane that is still leaning against the end of the table. “Thank you,” she murmurs. “I like the knife.”

It’s Max’s turn to nod. “Good.” He rubs at the beard that is starting to thicken over his jaw and hums to himself.

“I wasn’t sure you’d stay.”

He doesn’t properly respond to that, just takes her plate and wanders back towards the kitchen with it, so she grabs her cane and follows him.

They conserve and re-use water as best they can, because the Citadel’s water-recycling technology – though significant – was never designed for more than a few hundred people, and they have two-thousand and some living here now. Most dishes and cookware get steam-sterilized and then scrubbed with sand, a process primarily controlled by the children. As a result, Furiosa is unsurprised when a blonde, blue-eyed girl whose head barely reaches Max’s hip blocks his path a few steps into the kitchen and glares at him until he hands her the plate. She adds it to a stack of three she already has balanced on one hand and scurries away.

“They like the responsibility,” Furiosa tells him. She touches his elbow. “Come on.”

Max doesn’t comment on her slow pace through the halls; when she starts huffing with irritation at herself, he smiles a little and half-beds to tap his left knee. “I had a brace for a long time. Had to be nice to it.”

She rolls her eyes at him and keeps pushing forwards.

The moon is no longer full; it has waned to a fat crescent hanging at the edge of Furiosa’s window when they reach her room. She leans her weight against her workbench and turns so that she’s facing Max. He’s still shirtless under that jacket after six days of being back. “You didn’t have to stay,” she tells him.

Max raises his eyebrows. “I… wanted to.” His face wrinkles a little. “To stay.”

“I gave an order to kill a man today. To one of his own clan.”

“And children will live because of that order.” Max touches two knuckles against her metal hand. “Easy,” he murmurs when she drops her chin into her chest. “Hey.”

Furiosa shakes her head and sets aside her cane. Standing squarely on her feet is not manageable for long, but it is worth it to slip her hand around Max’s neck and press him up to fit their faces together. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands when she’s standing and not critically injured or bleeding everywhere, and she almost laughs before he sets them very lightly and carefully around her ribs. His shirt flattens against her skin.

Kissing Max feels like hauling on the war rig’s horn to gather the forces while charging headfirst into a pack of enemy cars. She gets him backed up against a wall and holds him there, left forearm braced against the stone to keep weight off her bad leg, cupping his head while his hands find scars on her ribs that can be felt through the fabric of his shirt. Her calluses catch and drag over the smooth skin of his neck, and then one of his hands drops, finds the hem of the shirt, and slips under it.

Max is a terrifically warm human being, and his palm radiates heat into her skin even as she curls her first into his hair. He’s grinning when she leans back far enough to look at him, fractals of moonlight caught at the crinkling edges of his eyes. His thumb follows a knife-scar that traces the line of her bottom rib, and she stops breathing.

“My leg can’t take this,” she says, which is true, and annoying, because her leg _does_ hurt, but mentioning it makes Max take his hand off her ribs.

He lets her use him as a leaning post to reach her sleeping mat, and shrugs off his jacket while she unbuckles her arm and drags off her boots. Then he sits back on his haunches while she props herself up on her elbows and they spend a minute staring at each other in complete silence.

“Why did you stay?”

Max frowns. “You’re here.”

“I was here before.”

“You weren’t dying before.” He looks away, out the window, then drags his eyes back to hers. “I’ll fight the north. With you.”

Furiosa clenches her fist until the knuckles crack, then lets go. “No promises for after, then.” The chances of there being an ‘after’ are so slim that she can’t muster any degree of anger about it, so she holds out her hand instead, until Max comes back into her space and lies next to her.

He catches that hand in his own and brushes his mouth over her knuckles before she can do anything, then turns it to kiss the inside of her wrist. Furiosa lets her left arm drop so that she’s lying on her back, and Max tucks himself in under her right shoulder, arm slung low across her ribs. He presses one final kiss onto the jut of her collarbone before he settles all the way down to sleep, the beginnings of his beard tickling over the skin. She cups her hand over his shoulder and lets herself breathe against him until her mind calms.

***

The next morning, Furiosa walks with Toast and Capable down to the barred-off corner of the Organic Mechanic’s lair where they were keeping the Buzzard prisoner. Polly is already there, scratching at something in her lap with a needle. The Buzzard is sprawled on his back next to her chair. Polly looks up and nods at the three women in the doorway, then leans down to jab the needle into the hole she left in the Buzzard’s chest, soaking it with blood. “Don’t take too many cars to dump this, unless you want a fight.”

“You told her to do this?” Toast asks.

Furiosa nods.

Capable turns her face away. “They’ll never help us like this.”

“They wouldn’t help you if you crawled there on your hands and knees with a tanker of water and offered a dozen slaves for every Buzzard in exchange for their help,” Polly calls without lifting her eyes from her work. “My father cut off my leg to feed my brothers. My sister shot herself over being captured by War Boys. Buzzards do what Buzzards will. All you’ve got here is a chance to appeal to the most blood-thirsty of the lot, and promise them good killing before they get their heads blown off.” She stabs the needle into the wound again. “You may get five, or you may get fifty. But you best make sure that they keep their hands off the people here so you don’t have to kill them yourselves.”

“When will they come? Do you know?” Toast draws her shawl tighter around her shoulders as she asks.

“When they see the dust of a thousand cars and hear those famous rockets screaming, I’d bet. Some might be early, if they realize you’ve let the Rock Riders in to enjoy our creature comforts.” Another stab. “Hope you girls can bluff well enough to convince Gas Town and the Bullet Farm to fight, if that’s still your plan. Buzzards make up their mind at the last second about damn near everything.”

Toast flicks her gaze at Furiosa, then sighs and rubs a hand over her forehead. “Where should we be dumping this body?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Complete honesty here: I spent about half an hour looking at cane designs before I realized a hidden knife was way more Furiosa's style than some fancy handle carving. Between the cane, the basketball shorts, and the knee-high boots, she's totally setting the trend for Citadel fashion.


	8. I Ain't Scared of No Wet, No Wave

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Half of the reason that this story exists is because I was bone-tired of wonderful extension-on-the-narrative tales that felt the need to force a rape backstory onto Furiosa. As someone who spent five years getting molested by a cousin before I hit puberty, every single one of those stories invariably made me feel so uncomfortable that I had to stop reading, and some almost started panic attacks. So this was a story for the people like me, who wanted to believe that even in the post-apocalypse, there's a chance that a woman can make an attempted rapist regret waking up that morning.  
> This is not a story where Furiosa's rage stems from rape. This is a story where she got to win.

Time passes differently inside the Citadel than it does on the road. With the overhanging threat from the north and the fixed, static quality of the horizon, the hours crawl by until Furiosa wants to scratch her skin off. She spends two days in the main garage, working on the war rig with Piker and four other mechanics, and comes away with a machine that is fully capable of laying a track of high-velocity death across the wasteland. Her leg isn’t healed enough to tolerate driving, but they still lower the rig down to the canyon floor and have the Milking Mother mechanic – Kero, her name is Kero – drive a couple of rumbling, zig-zagging laps around the buttes with a squadron of mechanics hanging off the cab and from the sides of the trailer.

The rig is a car-hauler, complete with battered, rusted-out mechanical corpses lining the steel-framed levels. Once they pull those cars out and salvage or scavenge them as necessary, they can pack so many people and guns onto the rig that it _bristles_.

The Buzzard’s corpse – with Polly’s note pinned over the dried-out hole in his chest – gets dumped near a nuke scar about a kilometer over the rough border between Citadel and Buzzard territory. After three days, they send out a pair of bikes to check the spot and find no body and no note.

On the fourth day, the council has a tense, terse emergency meeting. Polly doesn’t say a word while Dixie makes a proposal to bluff the Bullet Farm as best they can, and then lay pressure against Gas Town once they have the extra support. “We’re running out of time” is the general assumption. Dixie, Cab, the black Wretched representative, the War Boy with the clawed-up face, Toast, and even Polly set down their tokens in favor of the proposal. Capable wants to give the Rock Riders and Buzzards more time to appear so that they can have weight behind their claims. The two dissenting Wretched representatives, both pale-skinned and relatively unscarred by tumors, try to make a case for taking their chances with _only_ the Rock Riders and Buzzards. The second War Boy wants to abandon the bottom floors of the buttes, seal up the entrances, and hide like the invasion is a dust storm that will blow over in a few months.

Furiosa starts prepping for the trip immediately.

You only need a working left leg to ride a motorcycle, but she has to swear up and down to the Dag that she won’t pop her stitches, and the idea of tight, abrasive, scab-tearing pants after days of loose shorts is almost bad enough to make her reconsider. She has to change her shirt, too, because she’s been wearing Max’s for something like twelve days and there’s as much grease in it as there is fabric after two days of tuning up the war rig. She washes her body with cold water from a bucket for the first time since waking up and leaves murky brown puddles of the floor of the wash-room.

The bathing area is right next to the laundry room, so she collects a set of clean clothes, pulls them on, and heads back to her quarters with a long rolled-up strip of cloth in her hand. “Can you help me with something?” she asks Max.

He doesn’t figure it out until she knocks the door shut with her cane and drags her shirt off.

Rewinding her chest binding is definitively easier with two people. Max places himself behind her, never touching her skin except for brushes of fingertips when they pass the roll of cloth.

She does most of the work of clipping her hair, too, but hands him the razor to finish the back of her head, between the white and pink scars left by the shotgun blast.

She’s slipping back into the skin of an Imperator by the time she pulls on her shirt again. When she finishes tightening the buckles on the last of her pelts and adjusting her prosthesis, she’s a smear of grease away from the person who served Joe.

Max must see it, but doesn’t say anything on the way to the lower garage. Having to use the cane makes her feel a little better – less Joe’s Imperator, more Sapling and Max’s Fury, Valkyrie’s Furiosa.

All of the girls are waiting down in the garage: Cheedo and the Dag are tucked together next to her motorcycle, whispering and pressing occasional kisses onto each other; Toast and Capable are huddled over a ledger they have propped open on the handlebars of Furiosa’s bike. Sapling is perched on the seat with her chubby legs dangling, one hand firmly gripping a fold of the Dag’s skirt. “Don’t get hurt, Auntie,” she orders Furiosa with a stern pout.

Furiosa can’t crouch, so she leans against the seat next to Sapling. “I’m just going to talk to people.” She holds out her metal hand so Sapling can slap her palm into it.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Sapling allows her a grin while the Dag scoops her up. “Ride safe,” her mother murmurs. Toast and Capable withdraw their ledger and give her solemn nods.

Furiosa swings her left leg over the bike. She welded a pair of clamps under her seat yesterday; her cane clicks into them easily.  “We’ll be back before dawn.” She reaches down to swipe grease onto her fingers and smears it across her forehead, then looks at Max as her steps up.

Cab, Piker, and Yabby stomp their engines into gear and roll through the garage doors.

Max brushes his knuckles over her shorn hair and studies her face for a breath before he bends to kiss her.

Most of the background noise abruptly cuts out.

Furiosa drags her right hand up Max’s neck, and keeps it there once he pulls back. “Dawn,” he says, and she nods.

She doesn’t have a better way to say goodbye, so she pulls back her hand, knocks the closed fist against her chest, then kicks her engine to life and follows her guards out onto the road.

***

The Citadel, Gas Town, and Bullet Farm form a triangle constellation on a map. Gas town is the furthest south, Bullet Farm the furthest north. The Citadel sits at the widest angle in the triangle, almost straight north of Gas Town, southwest from the Bullet Farm. It’s a shorter ride to the Bullet Farm than to Gas Town, but not by much, and they leave after noon. The Citadel mirror-flashes their impending arrival, so there is a congregation waiting under a set of blazing floodlights when they reach the compound of gun factories.

The Bullet Farm’s regime change was somewhat bloodier than Gas Town’s, as one would anticipate from a society built around weapons manufacturing. There must be fifty gun barrels pointed at the four bikes, and three hundred sets of parched-dry eyes staring at them.

“Where’s our water?” The man who asks has maintained the old Bullet Farmer’s habit of strapping ammunition to every part of his body, including his head. Having someone with that kind of outfit pointing twin submachine guns at her is a little too familiar for Furiosa to be comfortable.

“Put the guns down, Byron. We need to talk.”

“About my water?”

“About armies.”

Byron squints at her from the shadows of his bullet-wig. “What you playing, Imperator?””

“There’s an army coming from the north. Death cult. You know the type. Depending on how they come down, they’ll hit here or the Citadel first. Maybe both at the same time – there could be ten thousand of them.”

“If they come here, they’ll have a hell of a fight. But ten thousand…” Byron scratches his chin. “They hit you, we lose our water? That what this is?”

“They have some old world military base. They won’t need guns or bullets for a long time.”

“You’re sure of this?”

Furiosa tries to stretch her bad leg without visibly wincing. “We already have Rock Riders on our side and have sent a message to the Buzzards. I went to the Riders myself, and ran into a northern scout on the way. The Riders decided we had a point after they got to loot his corpse and play with his rocket launcher. Makes your fire-sticks look like matches.”

Byron scowls. “What’re you asking? Us to fight some kamakrazee conquerors when they come bangin’ at our door?” He looks to both sides and raises his arms. “Do we want to die because some foul northern scummer cut off our water and bled us dry, or because each one of us took down ten of them for trying to take our home?”

The responding thunder rolls through Furiosa’s bones.

Byron drops his arms and makes a dismissive waving motion in her direction. “These fools could use a fight. Get us some damned water; we’ll trade you all the firepower you need, and we’ll ride for the Citadel if we see lotsa strange cars headed your way. Assume you’ll return the favor, unless you’ve found a way to grow bullets.”

“Of course.”

It’s easy, then. There’s the obligatory handshake, a few sentences about the amounts of water and guns that’ll be traded, and then the motorcycles wheel around, and suddenly Furiosa is facing the Citadel again.

As soon as they’re clear of the noise and light of the Bullet Farm, Cab nudges her bike up so that she and Furiosa are riding side-by-side. “That was too easy,” she yells over the wind and the engines.

“They need us more than Gas Town does,” Furiosa yells back. “They’ve always loved war.”

Cab shakes her head. “Don’t like it,” she calls, but falls back to her regular position covering Furiosa’s left flank.

***

They do get back before dawn. Cheedo and the Dag are awake and waiting for them, wrapped in a blanket and sitting against a car with Sapling asleep across their laps. She’s so far gone that the guttural growl of the bikes doesn’t wake her.

“She insisted,” Cheedo explains. She shakes Sapling awake while Furiosa unhooks her cane and climbs off her bike slowly and with much creaking of joints. “Did it go okay?”

“They said they’ll fight with us. It’ll be hard for them not to if they get hit first.” Furiosa limps around the end of her bike as Sapling crawls to her feet.

“I still don’t like it,” Cab declares, and Yabby mutters agreement.

Sapling mumbles something and totters over to plaster herself against Furiosa’s good leg. Furiosa rests her hand on her tousled blonde hair while she speaks: “They can’t do much to hurt us without dooming themselves once the norherners come. They need water as much as anyone.” The torn muscle in her leg twinges in protest at every shift after spending most of a day locked in one position.

“Enough,” declares the Dag, scooping Sapling up in her arms despite weak, sleep-slurred protests. “We all need sleep. You council people can talk about war later.” She sweeps off with Sapling tucked against her chest and Cheedo’s arm around her waist.

Furiosa nods at her guards and stumps up to her room. Max is a black smear balled up on her sleeping mat with his back against the wall. She sits at the edge of the mat to pull off her boots and arm and peel off her pants to replace them with her shorts, then rolls onto her good side, facing him. “Hey.”

Max makes a noise of recognition.

“I’m back.”

He rumbles out of the bottom of his chest and unfolds so she can pull him against her. He hums, presses a scratchy kiss onto her throat, then tucks his face into the curve of where her neck meets her shoulder, curls his arm over her ribs, and goes to sleep.

She sighs and follows him.

***

For as long as Furiosa and Max have been sleeping next to and on top of each other, he has made a point of not directly facing her. She realizes why when she wakes up with his face still buried in her shoulder and something nudging her thigh. Max is also lying entirely too still to be asleep.

Furiosa kisses his hair. “Morning.”

He makes an unhappy noise into her shoulder.

She grins. “Sleep well?”

Max turns his head just enough to raise his eyebrows at her. He looks so disgruntled that she actually laughs for the first time in forever. Then she kisses him.

He’s trembling when he cups her face – soft, nervous, practically twitching when she nudges him onto his back and leans over him. “This okay?” she asks.

Max is shirtless, jacket balled up where he was using it as a pillow, arms and torso riddled with scar tissue, watching her with something twisted up behind his eyes.

“Max?”

A rueful smile tugs at his mouth. “Been a long time.”

“Okay.” She holds out her hand until he knots their fingers together, then folds her stump across his chest and rests her chin on it. “I never bled like girls are supposed to. They thought I was hiding it. But I kept breaking people who, you know, tried, so I… I never have.” She shrugs as she swipes her thumb over his hand. “We’ll figure it out.”

Max nods. He squeezes her hand, then makes as if to sit up. Furiosa moves to give him space, but he keeps going all the way over, until she’s on her back and he’s on hands and knees leaving over her. Her good leg is curled up reflexively, knee under his ribs and foot planted against his pelvis so she can kick him away.

She winces. “Habit.”

“Sorry,” Max grunts, already pulling back.

Furiosa shakes her head, drops the leg, and beckons him back with her hand on his knee. “It’s okay.”

He frowns.

“Max. It’s okay.”

His mouth twitches. “Tell me to stop,” he murmurs, before leaning down and pressing his face into her neck. Furiosa closes her eyes and sinks her hand into his hair as he cradles her head, laying soft presses against her neck. When he scrapes his teeth against a spot under her ear, she hisses and closes her fist until he comes up to kiss her through his smile. His left hand has worked up under her shirt to stroke over her skin, before it pauses at the bottom of her ribcage, tracing what she knows is a gnarled slit of raised, nerveless flesh.

She thumbs over his cheekbone. “That was you.”

His hand rubs over the mark. “I’m sorry.” Before she can tell him to shut up he’s twisting down, away, setting his mouth against the scar.

Furiosa almost knees him in the stomach and gasps at the contrasting jolts from her leg and everywhere Max is touching her. Then he moves to her other side, to the rounder scar left by the Polecat. The skin over her ribs has been scraped and torn and slashed into a patchwork, and she takes deep stuttering breaths as Max learns every mark. She traces the welt of the brand on his neck, imagines she can feel the words of his blood bag tattoo raised slightly across the top of his back. When she’s so oversensitized that her legs are starting to shake, she pulls Max up to her face and kisses him, rolls him back over until she’s on top, bracketed by his thighs, nails scratching down his chest.

Max’s hands are climbing up her sides again when Capable shoves the door open.

“Furiosa, the Rock Ri – _oh_.”

Furiosa squints at her. Capable has her hands up, covering her mouth, but she can’t hide the crinkle and gleam of her eyes. Max is completely immobile under Furiosa. “Rock Riders?” she grits.

Capable nods. “Sentries saw a green flare from the southeast. But they’re still hours out. So… take your time?” She skitters out faster than she entered.

Furiosa looks down at Max. “Did that ruin it?”

He smooths his hands over her sides and hums with a smile on his face.

Furiosa settles her head against his chest, doodling small designs with her fingertips while he traces over her skin, thumbing at the smattering of marks laid across her back. He doesn’t stray above her chest bindings or below the waistband of her shorts, but he does keep returning to her twin lung-puncturing and life-saving scars like he’s checking for proof. Yes, she stole a war rig and five slaves. Yes, he helped her reach her family. Yes, she was stabbed. Yes, she killed a god-king. Yes, she almost died. Yes, he made sure she didn’t.

The last of the Vuvalini died months before Max came back. Bad heart. They planted an orange tree over her. Nobody knows what happened to the bodies of Valkyrie and Maddie, left behind in the salt across the mountains. Furiosa blinks and realizes that she and Max drove past the corpse of the Keeper of the Seeds when they went to bargain with the Rock Riders. She’d been so busy recognizing the Doof Wagon she hadn’t even –

Max toucher her hair. “Fury?”

She rolls off of him and stares at the ceiling, wheezing.

“Hey, hey.” Max follows her. “You’re alright. You’re safe.”

“No, I know. I know.” She tries to pull her knees up to her chest and snarls when her right leg protests. Max watches without touching her. She swallows. “Ghosts,” she mutters, knuckling at her forehead, trying to breathe.

Max nods.

***

They dress and walk to the mess hall together in silence. Furiosa doesn’t want to be around people who will try to talk to her, so Max grabs two plates and lets her lead the way up to the high gardens. He doesn’t complain when she heads for Polly’s corner, just sits next to her and watches Polly strip and clean the firing mechanism of a harpoon gun between bites of roasted lizard.

Furiosa doesn’t realize that she’s eaten until she sets down her empty plate. She stands, and Polly looks at her.

“Feel like scrubbing rust, Imperator?” She flicks her eyes towards a pile of harpoons that haven’t been touched since before Joe died.

Furiosa picks up a scrub-brush, leans her cane against the boulder, and locks her metal hand around a harpoon to hold it still.

Max isn’t there for a while. A long while. When she thinks to look for him, it only takes a few seconds before she spots him crouched in the dirt, watering trees.

***

The Rock Rider swarm becomes visible from the top of the Citadel in the early afternoon. Furiosa feels a little less like she’s hauling around the corpses of her family by that point, so she follows the shouts to the southern end of the butte. Polly easily keeps pace in her chair. They meet Max a few meters from the edge of the cliff.

All of them stare south for a minute before Polly pokes Furiosa in the ribs. “You got a telescope?”

Max digs through his jacket’s pockets and hands Polly a metallic tube, then steps to Furiosa’s other side.

Polly peers through the telescope, swears under her breath, and passes it to Furiosa. She squints through it and drags in a breath.

There are Rock Riders coming up the road from Gas Town, but there aren’t the three dozen she saw in the canyon. Dust is kicking up a swirling cloud around them, but Furiosa can still see that Nada hasn’t brought every Rock Rider under her command. She may have called in every tribe who scratches out their lives in the nooks and crannies of the wall of mountains, though.

“That’s two hundred bikes, at least,” Polly is saying. “Maybe three. What did you offer them, woman?”

Furiosa exhales and feels a corpse fall from her shoulders. “We gave them a place to hide.” She hands Max his telescope and starts limping towards the door to the interior. Max catches up to her after a few steps, and Polly’s chair squeaks as she wheels it up behind them.

“They might be trying to take the Citadel on their own,” she warns.

“I’d rather be killed by a Rock-Ricker than a northerner,” Furiosa fires back. She heads for the lower garage and finds it bustling with mechanics trying to conjure enough space for the hundreds of dirt bikes headed their way. Forging through the chaos with a cane is futile, so she lets Polly take the lad and batter people out of the way with her chair.

Outside is marginally better. The ground entrance to the third butte – which had been opened into a communal space that is used as a staging area for performances of skill or story – is being packed with their more weather-resistant vehicles. There are no doors to close on the theater, so no one lives there and has to be displaced, but Furiosa knows that someone is going to complain to the council about it. Maybe they can turn the mess hall into a replacement theater.

Furiosa watches the great nets of rock weights rise as the newly-outfitted war rig sinks to the canyon floor. Kero keeps its pace to a crawl to let other vehicles wind around it as she tucks it against the edge of the theater, out of the worst of the dirt and sand. A dozen cars and motorcycles pack onto the platform before it rises again.

The rumble of bikes at Furiosa’s back has become a rising thunder. She turns around. The swarm is less than a kilometer away. Mechanics are shouting orders to get the last of the cars out of the way as she limps into the middle of the canyon.

Nada rides her bike up through a swarm of onlookers until her front wheel is almost touching Furiosa’s boots. The move makes any sniper aiming at her risk hitting Furiosa, in case the sheer mass of bikers behind her wasn’t enough to discourage them.

“You look much less dead than the last time,” Nada says by way of greeting. “Sorry ‘bout the delay. Had to rustle up a few cousins.” She pulls up her goggles to the base of her helmet’s horns and tucks her face scarf under her chin. “We got three hundred Riders who ain’t interested in getting new neighbors, but I had to call in a lot of favors to get them here.” She glances over her shoulder as Amí pulls up next to them, that golden revolver strapped onto their thigh. “Did I bring my people here to die?”

Furiosa shakes her head. “The Bullet Farm is sworn to fight, and you’re welcome here. All of you. Whatever you need.”

“Good.” Nada jerks her chin at Amí, who spins their bike around, then cups their hands around their mouth and bellows so loud that echoes ring back off the walls:

“Get the bikes out of the dust and the sand out of your boots, you gnarly mountain mutts. Then get some grub and a wink of sleep. We’re safe here, but we’ve got a war coming our way.”


	9. She Who Mars the Skin of Gods

Nada and Amí insist on organizing the storage of the bikes before Furiosa and Polly can get them to trek up to the council’s meeting chamber, where eight nervous representatives are waiting. Max comes too. The Riders take Furiosa’s place at the edge of the dais while she remains standing an arm’s length away, Max hovering in her shadow.

“How many Rock Riders?” is the first question asked.

Nada’s cheerful response: “Three hundred and eight.”

Then someone wants to know if they have an ulterior motive for coming (“Will you try to take the Citadel by force” is never actually said aloud, but it doesn’t have to be.) Nada snorts and asks for an account of how badly her Riders are outnumbered.

“About ten to one,” Furiosa says.

“We’ll save the takeover for another time, then.”

Toast butts in to ask what kind of resources the Riders need in terms of mechanical parts and weaponry. Nada shrugs and asks for the pick of the scrap heaps.

Then that War Boy with the clawed-up face asks the only question that the council really cares about: “How do we know we can trust you?”

Nada yanks off her helmet and headscarf. All of her hair is long and black with a few strands of silver threated into it, but when she pulls most of it into a bundle behind her head, her beard becomes a distinct mass hanging down her chest. “I’ve been told that these people got problems with women. They take over, what are they going to do to me? What about someone who’s not woman or man?” Her eyes flick to Amí, sitting silent behind their helmet and goggles, arms folded over their chest. “My people deserve better than some ritual sacrifice.”

Polly cackles from the far end of the table. “So the bastard freaks have come running to the wise mothers for protection, is that it?”

Amí lunges to their feet. The golden revolver is out of its holster and tracking upwards by the time Furiosa gets her arm wrapped around their neck, the knife from her cane pressed against their jugular.

“Put it down,” she hisses.

“They insult her as if she were not here to save them!”

“Polly’s a damn Buzzard; she’s more of a freakish bastard than anyone here.” Furiosa tightens her grip. Her leg burns. “Put it down.”

“Amí,” Nada warns. She’s still sitting, muscles locked in place. Toast has a pistol on her, and Cab has risen from her seat and has a shotgun couched against her shoulder.

Amí lowers the revolver.

Furiosa lets go and tries to step backwards without falling. Max scoops up the base of her cane and holds it out so she can click the pieces together, taking the weight off her bad leg.

“Are we done here?” Nada demands.

Capable nods hurriedly: “Yes – our apologies.” She starts to rise.

Nada shakes her head, stands, cuffs Amí’s shoulder, and leads them out of the room.

Polly is smirking before their shadows clear the doorway. “They haven’t got the brains to plot against us,” she declares.

Furiosa glares. “Next time, I let you get shot.”

“No, you won’t,” Polly retorts gleefully.

“Shut up,” Dixie orders. “What do we do about Gas Town?”

“Leave them out of it,” Furiosa snaps. “Worry about keeping the allies we already have.” She limps out, too slow, trying to ignore the eyes on her back. She’s down the hall before she realizes that Max hasn’t followed. That just irritates her further, so she stomps her way down to the lower garage, fueling the pain in her leg.

The Rock Riders are distinguished by their outfits and the horned helmets many have propped against their hips or dangling from their handlebars, but most are also darker than the Citadel residents, almost universally black and brown and red. There have always been black War Boys buried under the white paint, but people the color of Valkyrie and Cheedo were fewer and further between. Furiosa doesn’t see a single white Rock Rider.

Nada and Amí are in the middle of a pack, talking with lots of hand gestures. Amí is the only one still wearing a helmet, as genderless as Nada is vehemently female. Their goggles turn towards Furiosa. “Back again, Imperator?”

She stumps closer. “The name is Furiosa. They stop calling you Imperator once you kill the god-king.”

“So _you’re_ Immortan then. Immortan Furiosa.”

She shakes her head. “Never.” Her motorcycle is at the rim of the divide between Citadel and Rock Rider vehicles; it dwarfs the dirt bikes that are packed together next to it. Furiosa leans her weight on it, half-sitting against the seat. “How did you get three hundred and eight Riders to follow you?’

“Scary stories and sweet promises,” Nada answers. “Once enough people joined the swarm to leave, the rest followed out of fear they’d be left to fight alone.” She wraps an arm around a younger rider, a teenager with sandstone-red skin and blue eyes. “We have children and pregnant mothers we’ll ask to leave behind your walls when the fighting comes. About thirty. If you have the guns and the time, you can make snipers out of them, but they can’t ride to fight.”

Furiosa nods. “I’ll see what I can do.”

The girl under Nada’s arm turns her head, tracking something with her eyes. “Is that your child?”

Furiosa follows her gaze to where Sapling is crouched behind the rear wheel of a dirt bike. She sees the Riders watching her, squeals, and scurries for cover behind Furiosa’s motorcycle. When Furiosa reaches behind her seat with her can, Sapling shrieks. She circles around the front wheel, dodges between the knees of half a dozen Riders, and then gets scooped up by Cheedo.

“Sorry.” Cheedo strokes Sapling’s hair and cradles her against her chest. “She doesn’t meet many new people.”

“Well, she’s not alone,” grunts one of the Riders.

The teenager creeps away from Nada to stand in front of Cheedo. She waves.

Sapling waves back.

“Were you born here?” asks another Rider. “I’ve seen your face.” They’re staring at Cheedo. Tangles of dark hair bleached yellow and orange by the sun hang past their shoulders.

“I was taken young,” Cheedo says. “But I come from the west.”

Nada cocks her head. “You’re one of those girls Lady Furiosa blew us apart for.”

Cheedo shifts Sapling onto her back, arms folded back to support her weight. She nods.

“That the Immortan’s child?”

Furiosa forces herself to stand. “Don’t make me threaten a life twice today.”

Nada shoots a glare at her. “We don’t hurt children.” She leans over to make eye contact with Sapling and stabs a finger at Furiosa. “Who is that, little one?”

Sapling pulls at her lip with the hand not gripping Cheedo’s shoulder. “Aunt Fury.”

“You know what she and your mama did so you could be safe?”

Sapling frowns at the side of Cheedo’s head, then shakes her own.

Nada smiles. “You tell her the story someday. I wanna know what she thinks.”

“And what did you do to claim power after we passed through?” Cheedo demands. “We left three war parties behind us.”

“Oh, we – I – did ugly things. Things small children shouldn’t hear.” Nada shrugs it off. “It was that or die, and I brought us here today for the same reason. Sure you can understand.”

***

Cab, Piker, and Yabby filter through the garage in the late afternoon. “We’re going to Gas Town,” they tell her. “See you tomorrow.”

Cab takes the lead position, as befits her place on the council, and they’re gone in a swirl of dust. Max comes with them, and watches their trail from the door as Furiosa limps to his side.

“Want to help me with something?”

He raises his eyebrows.

Most of the Rock Riders know how to use handguns but have never held a rifle – hunting, assault, or sniper – in their lives. Assault rifles are useless for their task; many of the Citadel’s became twisted hunks of metal and rubber in the Rock Rider’s canyon, and Furiosa has focused on bartering hunters and snipers from the Bullet Farm ever since.

That afternoon, they pump almost six thousand gallons of water into a tanker and pack it off to the Bullet Farm under the charge of Kero and twin handfuls of guards and gun mechanics with orders to bring back every scrap of lethal weaponry they can convince Byron and his lackeys to part with. Then Furiosa compiles a list of twenty of her best snipers and sentries and sits with Nada and Amí, discussing how to pair them with the Rock Riders who need to be trained. Max is sent trekking through the buttes, sometimes returning with a mildly confused sniper and sometimes carry news of people sleeping or sitting watch who refuse to be disturbed unless Furiosa herself gives the order. They get ten of the Rock Riders paired off before dinner, and Furiosa sorts out an extra eight children she deems too young to fight.

“Most of them have already seen death,” Amí tells her.

In response, she hands them her rifle.

They don’t outright stagger, but there is a grunt of acknowledgment before they pass the weapon to Nada, who frowns as she hefts it.

“That’s almost fifteen kilos of steel that you’re holding; the recoil can make an adult lose an eye. A child’s collarbone could shatter. Or their skull.” Furiosa twists her cane. “We can use them as supply runners and messengers, but I won’t train them with the rifles.”

Nada hands back the rifle and watches Furiosa sling in across her back. She shrugs. “Don’t make them feel like they’re being forced to hide. That’s all they’ll care about.”

***

The mess hall is louder than usual, with Rock Riders packed into corners and sprawled on every flat surface – including the floor – without concern. They’ve filtered throughout the buttes over the course of the afternoon, poking heads into and running hands over every facet of the Citadel. The greenhouses and gardens saw outright invasions as red-clad Riders wandered through them, brushing reverent fingertips over the green and whispering to each other, sometimes cupping a flower or tracing the curve of a hanging fruit. The kitchen delights everyone who ventures inside.

Their fascination has not dimmed as Furiosa heads towards her quarters. There are at least ten Riders packed together around every source of communal water – most of them are afraid to touch it for fear of contaminating it with the dust and dirt ground into their skin.

“Do you think they’ll stay?” she asks Max. “Those that survive?”

He shrugs.

***

In the morning, the faint grumble of returning bikes pulls her face out of the back of Max’s neck and pries her eyes open. She’s just buckled on her arm and is watching Max rub grit from his eyes when she hears the kind of dry sobbing that only happens when someone has been crying for hours and has nothing left. Her quarters are the last living area in the hall before you reach the vault that used to be a cage; it’s not an unfamiliar sound. When she yanks her door open, she finds Cab and Yabby passing by, heading for the vault. Cab has something long and inert slung over her shoulder.

Yabby hears the creaking hinges and turns around. Her face is as pale as her black skin allows, her eyes and voice hollow. “I was watching the ones on Cab. I didn’t see – she gurgles and trips backwards. “They shot her. They shot her from behind. She didn’t-”

“Hush.” Furiosa wraps her right arm around Yabby’s shoulders and leads her onwards, following Cab’s trudging footsteps. “You don’t have to explain. Breathe.”

Yabby gasps like she hasn’t had a proper lungful of air all night.

The girls are all awake, but the Dag takes one look at Cab and sweeps Sapling out of the room before Furiosa and Yabby reach the door. They enter as Cab is gently setting down the body, cupping Piker’s head until it rests against the cold stone floor.

Piker’s face is frozen in a snarl, eyes alight. The bullet struck below the base of her skull and blew through her spine, then her jugular and windpipe, and out the front of her neck. If she didn’t die immediately, she was gone within seconds.

Toast swallows audibly. “What happened?”

Cab remains kneeling at Piker’s side, producing each sentence mechanically. “I told them we had Rock Riders and Bullet Farm. I said they had a choice. They said they’d already decided. They had someone behind us. We didn’t see. And then…” She drags in a heavy breath.

“Everything happened together,” Yabby croaks. “Someone shot Dirge, and then his people – they got Piker, and everyone was shooting each other, and we… we just ran.” She clutches her own wrists in a death grip.

Capable crouches beside Piker and closes her eyes with her fingertips. Toast squats next to her. “Can we retaliate?”

Furiosa shakes her head. She sees Max in the corner of her vision, hovering in the doorway at the edge of their grief. “They’re in civil war, and the northern army could be here any day. Let Gas Town tear itself apart.”

“They killed _her_ ,” Yabby hisses through her teeth.

Cab wraps her arms around herself and stares at the floor.

“Pick a tree to plant,” Furiosa tells them.

Cheedo clears her throat. “The mechanics don’t know.”

Cab blinks. “We’ll tell them.” She glances at Yabby, whose body has found a fresh reserve of tears. “They knew her best.”

Yabby nods.

Cab unfolds her arms and gathers Piker up once more, cradling her instead of slinging her over her shoulder again. The body looks like a pale child’s. “C’mon,” she murmurs.

Yabby’s entire frame shakes as she nods and wheezes out another sob.

***

Furiosa stays with the girls for a while. Toast paces her frustration around the library while Cheedo sits next to Furiosa, arms wrapped around her knees. When the Dag returns with Sapling, Capable pulls a book off the wall to read aloud, occupying Sapling’s attention and keeping her quiet while the Dag curls around Cheedo.

Max comes back at some point with a collection of plates balanced on his arms. He passes them out: Capable, Cheedo, Toast. Then he kneels in front of Furiosa with the last one.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Rock Riders are looking for you.”

The Dag lifts her head from Cheedo’s shoulder. “The concerns of the living ought to outweigh the dead.”

Furiosa stares at Max.

He frowns. “Who are the snipers? The rest of them.”

She blinks. “I’ll find them.” She shoves herself to her feet.

Max steps into her path and hefts the plate with raised eyebrows.

She stops. “Max.”

He doesn’t budge.

Furiosa scowls and yanks the plate out of his hand, then shoves her cane at him. She eats as she walks, ignoring her leg, ignoring the reflex to choke when she inhales too much too fast. She almost takes the arm off of one of her snipers when they pass in the hall. “Garage,” she orders. “Now.”

The reformed War Boy nods with wide eyes, and skulks behind them the rest of the way down to the garage. Only a handful of mechanics are present, but there are a lot of Rock Riders.

Furiosa points the War Boy at a prematurely gray Rider who is resting one hand over a heavily-pregnant belly. “You’re teaching her to snipe. Disrespect her and she takes your head off. Go.” She shoves him on his way.

Nada is swiping the last crumbs of food off her own plate with a fingertip and licking it clean. Next to her is someone with dusty skin, sharp cheekbones, brown hair clipped close against their skull, a red crevice where their left eye should be, and a golden revolver strapped to their thigh. “Sorry for your girl,” Amí says. “They’re giving her a peach tree.”

Furiosa nods. “She liked those.”

Nada watches her limp over. “How’s that leg?”

“Fine.”

Her eyebrows twitch. “You got more snipers to spare?”

Furiosa looks over her shoulder at Max. She passes him her plate and takes her cane in return. “In the kitchen. Milking Mother with a bad limp and burn scars on her arms. Jenesa.”

He vanishes.

“That your husband or something?” Nada tugs on her beard braid.

Furiosa shifts more of her weight onto her good leg. “Does it matter?”

“Nah, just asking.” Nada smiles. “A good fuck’s the best way to get your mind off death, you ask me.”

Amí rolls their good eye.

Nada amends: “If you like fucking to begin with, that is.”

Furiosa looks between them, then clears her throat. “Who do you have left to train?”

***

Furiosa has too many ghosts on her back.

The Bullet Farm tanker returns with long-barreled rifles poking from every opening. Kero howls her grief when they tell her about Piker, and the mechanics who return with her sit a vigil around the newly-planted sapling in the high gardens, forming a quiet island out of the sea of milling Rock Riders.

After they finish paring off teacher-student sniper teams, Furiosa and Max drift back to her room. She pulls off her arm, sits in front of him, and lets him knuckle some of the knots out of her shoulders until each breath is a sigh, the muscles soft and sore. He does her neck, too, working small circles above her brand with his thumbs. She keeps her hand wrapped loosely around his calf.

When Max’s hands drop away, she leans back until she hits his chest. Her hand slips up to his knee. He hums and folds his arms around her ribs.

“The Rock Riders wanted to know if you were my husband.”

He huffs, then kisses the side of her head.

“I don’t understand it,” she says. “Marriage. Looks like an excuse for slavery.”

Max grunts. “Wasn’t supposed to be.” His cheek presses against her hair. “Used to mean more. Before.”

Furiosa half-smiles. “Would have been nice to live Before. Food. Water. No slaves. No kings.”

Max nods. He kisses her hair again, and she twists so she can reach his mouth, his arms slack around her. Her hand tightens on his knee. He grunts, presses a little more against her mouth before withdrawing. “How’s your leg?”

“Okay. Not great. Should’ve used the cane.”

He groans and nudges their faces together once more. One hand slides lower on her stomach, and a shiver runs through her. It pauses over her waistband. Max kisses her forehead, her temples, the bridge of her nose. “Can I?”

She licks her lips. “Yeah.”

Max’s hand slips under. Furiosa leans her head back against his shoulder. His fingers crook against her, and she shudders. “Hey, hey.” He noses behind her ear. “This okay?”

She drags her nails up his leg. “Don’t stop.”

Max smiles and kisses her cheek. He’s circling one spot with a fingertip that makes her twitch and rock her hips into the motion, the muscles fluttering under his palm. He ticks over the spot, just once, and she gasps. “Easy, Fury.”

She knocks her knees further apart and rasps a curse as his stubble grazes against her neck. “Don’t play around with me.”

Max hums and nips at her throat. The pad of his finger flicks over the bundle of nerves again and again, until she’s digging her nails into his thigh. He splays his palm over her ribs. The strokes come faster.

A coil of energy is knotting around the base of Furiosa’s spine. She arches upwards as Max presses his face against the side of her neck, and she closes her eyes, staring at the swirls of non-colors while shudders wrack her body, gasping the rush out of her nerves. Max rides her through it, keeps working until a few seconds after, then slides his hand free and wraps it around her. His palms settle over her scars.

“Hey,” he murmurs into her hair.

Furiosa lets her head loll back, feels something soft and wide stretch across her face. “Hey.”

Max presses his lips against the corner of her eye. “Better?”

“Yeah.” She brings her hand up to cup his face, turning towards him. “That was nice.”

He huffs and bumps their noses together. “You should sleep.”

She hums and nestles her face in under his chin. Max cradles her head, thumb stroking over her scars. He’s soft against her, holding her, letting her breathe. Her hand is still curled loosely around his neck. “You need anything?”

“Nah.” He traces a spiral through her hair. “Go to sleep, Fury.”

“Don’t tell me what to do, Fool.”

Max’s chest shakes with his laugh.

***

Her dream starts with an army on the horizon: a thousand war rigs charging south, loosing rockets that crumble the Citadel’s walls and shake the ground every time she takes a breath. She’s trying to hammer bullets into the engine blocks to stop the rigs, but the rest of her snipers are nowhere in sight. It’s Furiosa and her rifle alone amongst the fruit trees.

She sees someone on the ground through her scope, and then her vision warps so she’s staring onto her side mirror, tearing across the desert with three war parties closing in, watching Valkyrie’s back as she blasts away at Joe’s windshield. When she spins and throws herself down to cover Maddie, Furiosa screams.

She scrambles up from the dust and stares into the face of her mother. She has blood coating her teeth, gritted against the pain. She’s lifting a closed fist to her breastbone when a war rig shatters her out of its way, leaving the Keeper of the Seeds smiling serenely at Furiosa. Cupped in her hands is a skull that has a tree as tall as the Citadel sprouting from its crown. Something small and blue chirps at her from the branches.

Furiosa turns around and watches the People Eater’s war rig barrel towards them. Angharad is clinging to the driver’s-side door, howling rage.

Furiosa blinks herself to consciousness in the split-second before the bumper crushes her ribs.

Max is awake, kneeling at the edge of the mat, cupping his hands over his face. Blood streams between his fingers.

Furiosa’s leg is in agony. She rolls onto her good side and reaches for his knee. “Did I break it?”

Max pulls his hands away from his nose to study the blood clinging to them. “No.” He tips his chin up until he’s staring at the ceiling.

Furiosa curses as she crawls to her feet. She uses the wall to brace herself as she limps down the hall to one of the communal water sources and dampens two scraps of cloth. She gives Max one to clean his hands and uses the other to wipe the blood from his face. “Sorry.”

He grunts. “S’okay.” He shuts his eyes as she swipes a trickle away from the underside of his chin. “More ghosts?”

“Yeah.”

He hums acknowledgment. His hand – now blood-free – touches her spine. “You okay?”

“I almost broke your nose and you’re asking if _I’m_ okay?”

Max raises his eyebrows without bothering to open his eyes.

“Yes.” Furiosa pauses her work. “I’m fine.”

His frown tells her how much he doesn’t believe her. “Who are they?”

“The ghosts?”

Max nods and opens his eyes, watching the ceiling.

Furiosa moves to sit next to him so she doesn’t have to look at his face. “The Vuvalini. My mother. Angharad. Others.” She studies her feet. “I killed a lot of people to drive the war rig.”

Max hums again. He strokes down her spine with the same tender motion until she pulls up her good leg and rests her forehead against her knee.

“I’m tired,” she whispers.

Max doesn’t stop, but she feels him nod.

***

When the Dag pulls the stitches out of her leg, Furiosa doesn’t feel healed, specifically. She keeps using the cane more often than not, and doesn’t test her luck by running, but the marks on her body are becoming familiar. She’ll have a dent in her thigh from the tanker’s door handle for the rest of her life. The bare streaks on her head may grow hair again someday. And they’ve all become part of the collection of marks on her skin, telling the story of what she’s done. As they heal, the air is getting thinner, the days colder, the horizon clearer.

Some of the snipers-in-training have a talent for judging wind and gravity, and some don’t. The rest of the Rock Riders thread throughout the Citadel during the day, but congregate in the garages at night, sleeping on and between the waiting machines. Amí watches the snipers train, single eye hidden behind their helmet and goggles any time they’re not eating or asleep.

Piker’s tree takes root.

Flames are visible at night from the direction of Gas Town – burning fuel wells? Burning tankers? Burning bodies?

On one of the colder nights, Max fits Furiosa’s knees over his shoulders and spends a long time between her thighs, working her boneless with his fingers and tongue.

When her beard grows long enough, Nada spends half a day pulling apart the strands of her braid and then threading them together again. Sapling watches the entire process and starts calling her “Auntie” thereafter. When she learns that Amí doesn’t particularly care for genders, she gets stumped for an entire day before deciding that “Namí” is an acceptable substitute for an endearment.  

Cheedo and the Dag begin to lower their guard of her around the Rock Riders, and suddenly it is not unusual to find three or four wandering through the gardens with Sapling, asking her the names of plants, or to see her leading a tour of children through the Citadel, pointing out slender passages that used to be the exclusive territory of War Pups. One of the pregnant Riders teaches Capable to knit, and Toast stops worrying so much about feeding them after the first few days.

The mountains bustle and hum as winter sinks its claws in, but there is always a pair of eyes facing north, waiting for the first hint of a dust cloud.


	10. A Place Where No One Saw

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For a story that gets its first drafts written during Microeconomics lectures and has never been seen by a beta, there are an awful lot of you saying nice things about it, and I appreciate every one of you. <3 Here's some high-velocity murder as a thank-you?

Furiosa wanted to be ready when the call came. Everyone did. But when the war rig’s horn blast echoes through the Citadel and jerks her and Max awake as they’re lying tangled around each other, a cold fist clenches on her intestines and doesn’t let go.

Max buries his face in her shoulder and takes one deep breath before they clamber to their feet. She straps on her arm, he pulls on his boots. Then she finds hers, and he yanks a shirt and his jacket over his ink-stained back. Her eyes land on “keep muzzled” just long enough to register its meaning.

Max holds out her cane. She takes it, just in case, and slings her rifle across her back.

They almost run into Cheedo on their way out the door. “It’s the Bullet Farm,” she tells them. “There were scouts picking at them all night, and the rest of the army is less than a day away.”

Toast is a few steps behind her. “Tell Kero to keep the war rig here, will you? I want something more than just snipers left if the Bullet Farm attack is a decoy.” She shoves a toothpick into the side of her mouth as they move together towards the ground floor. “Unless you’re driving it, that is.”

Max and Cheedo both glance at Furiosa. “I’ll take my bike,” she says. She keeps moving, forging ahead, barely using her cane.

Half the Rock Riders have already cleared their bikes from the garage; they’re waiting outside with the Citadel vehicles that are geared-up and ready to hit the road. Cheedo and Toast pause at the doorway, and Toast touches Furiosa’s metal wrist.

“Angharad always had faith.” Her hand shakes. “Don’t make her a liar.”

Furiosa nods. Max has continued ahead; he’s a few steps into the garage before she reaches to grab his shoulder. “My bike seats two.”

He blinks. “You’re the better shot.”

“I know.”

He half-smiles, then nods in front of them. “Kero’s at the rig.” He gets swallowed by the crowd as Furiosa threads her way outside, navigating her way towards the rig until she sees Kero leaning against the bumper, scanning the crowd while the steel frame of the hauler slowly packs itself with bodies and weapons.

“I need you to stay here,” Furiosa calls over the ruckus. “I want the rig and at least ten cars on defense. Twenty, if you can get them.”

Kero nods. “Any of those Rock Riders want to guard their younglings and stay back, they’re welcome.” She clasps Furiosa’s shoulder. “They won’t take us.”

Furiosa bows her head. “Good luck.” Then she ducks back into the chaos.

Amí is drumming on their handlebars, leg bouncing, watching the trickle of Riders filtering out of the garage. Nada’s bike is parked next to them, seat empty. The sunrise glints off that golden revolver. “Beautiful day to die,” they offer as Furiosa walks up.

She glances around, then sets her cane between her feet and rests her weight on it. “Where’s Nada?”

“Still inside. What you need?”

“We’re leaving some forces here in case there’s another branch of their army headed this way. If any of your people want to stay behind, we’ll be happy to have them.”

Amígives her a thumbs-up. “I’ll let the word out. You riding with us?”

Furiosa nods, then turns to watch Max peel her bike out of the garage while Amí starts yelling at the Rock Riders.

He loops around most of the pack before he spots her and rides up. A brace of pistols is strapped to his chest, and there’s a bag hanging from the handlebars.

Furiosa digs into it, comes up with a pair of thigh holsters with high-caliber pistols already loaded and waiting and a wide black fiber belt with two more that she straps around her waist, under her rifle. The rest of the bag is bullets. She crams it into a small chest on the rear of the motorcycle. “Mind your leg,” she murmurs, and Max pulls his knee up so she can clip her cane in under the seat.

Nada stalks over as she’s straightening up again. “You leading the charge, Lady Furiosa?”

Max looks between them. “Nothing between here and Bullet Farm,” he says, and climbs off.

Nada grins and pulls her scarf up over her nose before jamming her helmet onto her head.

A child screams.

Furiosa spins to look for blood or smoke, but sees none, and then watches a Rock Rider wipe out their bike to avoid crushing Sapling as she bolts through the stream of wheels towards them.

Amí rushes out to meet her. “You shouldn’t be out here, little one,” they say, scooping her up.

Sapling sniffles and clutches at their chest. “I heard Ma and Mummy say you’re going to fight.” She points accusingly at Furiosa. “You’re gonna get hurt again.”

“No, I’m not.” She takes Sapling’s hand in hers. “We’re going to make sure everyone here stays safe.”

Sapling shakes her head. “You’re wearing guns. People with guns get hurt.”

“Sometimes people need to get hurt,” Nada tells her. “A little pain keeps life interesting. But I’ll make you a deal, yeah? We’re gonna come back. All of us. Rock Rider’s honor. I promise.”

Sapling looks wary, and turns her teary eyes on Furiosa. “You promise?”

Furiosa squeezes her fingers. “Promise.”

She pokes Amí’s chest with her other hand. “Promise?”

“Promise,” they say gravely.

Sapling swivels her head towards Max and waits.

His mouth twists. “Promise.”

Sapling sniffles some more, but nods and lets go of Furiosa’s hand. Amí carries her over to a frantic Dag at the entrance of the garage, and Furiosa climbs onto her bike. Max settles behind her and places his hands loosely on her waist, clear of both rifle and pistols.

Amí returns and hops onto their bike. “After you, Lady Fury.”

Furiosa stomps her engine to life as Max presses a fast kiss onto the plane of her shoulder. She tilts her head up to yell from the bottom of her lungs: “Citadel! We ride!”

***

For the first three hours, all they can see is the Bullet Farm. Furiosa keeps her motorcycle at the head of the pack, but Cab and Yabby eventually forge their way up to her flanks, riding between Nada and Amí. The dirt bikes can’t maintain the same speed as the motorcycles, but neither can half the trucks behind them, so Furiosa keeps her pace reasonable, preferring a coherent formation of vehicles to a strung-out train.

Two hours away from the Bullet Farm, she spots the swell of the northern army’s dust cloud and feels her stomach knot. “I kept hoping it was a lie,” she says just loud enough for Max to hear.

He kisses the back of her neck. “I’m sorry.”

Furiosa shakes her head.

The dust cloud keeps getting bigger. It’s not behind the Bullet Farm, but off to the left, a few degrees north, too easy to see out of the corner of an eye. People will be talking.

She doesn’t take them through the Bullet Farm; a few kilometers out, she sees their vehicles massing at the northern outskirts, and pulls the bike off the road towards them. Nada and Amí kick up their engines a notch and swing off to hop over a series of dunes, catching air with their bikes to attract the attention of their compatriots. The rest of the Riders follow them, so that they’re traveling in two distinct groups when they pull up alongside the Bullet Farm crowd. The sun is almost directly overhead.

“Watch the bike,” Furiosa mutters. She kills the engine and climbs off to stalk across the expanse of dirt. Byron is perched on top of a black box with a shiny steel grille. The truck’s original engine and wheels have been ripped out and replaced with items twice the size, and there’s a machine gun mounted in the pickup-truck bed that has been welded onto the rear, with bullets packed into every scrap of open space. The top has been taken off, too, so Byron is sitting in open air.

He salutes mockingly as she approaches. “Lovely day, Imperator.”

“Do you have a plan?” she demands. “Beyond ‘kill them before they reach your walls’?”

“Do you?”

She sighs. “We have harpoon and plow trucks. We’ll try to flank their biggest ones and slow them down. Just keep your people out of the Rock Riders’ way, and don’t shoot them.”

“Might be easier said than done,” Byron muses, but his eyes are crinkled at the corners. “Shall we go welcome our guests?”

A scout car tears out of the dust, cutting the Bullet Farm a wide berth as a white-wrapped body half-hangs out of the passenger window, binoculars pressed to their face to tally the reinforcements. Furiosa yanks her rifle off her back as a machine gun spits from the middle of the Bullet Farm line. The body drops from the window; the driver veers away.

A Rock Rider charges their bike from the crowd and tosses a grenade through the window before the northerner punctures their front time with a bullet. The Rider is catapulted over their handlebars as the scout car explodes. After a few seconds, the Rider scrambles to their feet and whoops. The northerner doesn’t.

“That’s as good a way as any to start a war,” Byron says. He plants a fist on his horn.

Four hundred car and truck and bike engines roar to life in response.

Max swings Furiosa’s bike up next to her as the first wave of defenders strike out to the north, Cab and Yabby bent over their handlebars, leading the Citadel pack between the Rock Rider and Bullet Farm swarms. Furiosa climbs aboard and cradles her rifle in her arms as Max follows them.

The dust obscures most of the oncoming silver-shining wave of death, but as the space between armies shrinks, Furiosa sees truck after truck with crosses mounted on them, flayed corpses nailed at the intersection of metal beams. Gouged-out eyes stare across the wastes as a quintet of rockets arc through the air.

“Scatter!” Byron bellows into a megaphone, and half the cars stomp on their brakes or veer away from their brethren. The Rock Riders do the same; one of the rockets lands in the middle of them, and metal shards whiz in all directions as two bikes disintegrate and four more are sent skidding on their sides.

The gunner on Byron’s truck opens fire. A tanker that would have made a respectable war rig gets its windshield shattered, driver shredded, and begins to drift aimlessly against the surging tide of cars. One of the northerners perched atop it scrambles into the cab; Furiosa shoots him, and the one after him, and then Byron’s gunner mows a trail along the top of the tanker as it passes between them.

A scream of metal and the smell of burning flesh has Furiosa grabbing Max’s shoulder, leaning with him to bring the bike away from the meandering tanker, and as they ride clear of its hind end Furiosa looks back to see a smoking, sparking ruin rolling to a halt where Byron’s truck should be. She turns forward again.

A figure in a cowboy hat is mounted under one of those crosses, on a rig hauling a flatbed of men with guns. Cowboy Hat also has a large steel tube that is swinging to point at her and Max.

Furiosa sights under the wide yellow brim of the hat and topples it backwards with the rest of the head it was sitting on. A smaller truck passing on the rig’s other side must hit the fallen rocket launcher, because it explodes, and takes half the men on the flatbed with it.

When Furiosa turns her head to scan the battle, there are five more war rigs that she can make out and countless smaller cars zipping between them, and everything else is a sea of dust that occasionally spits fire or produces another car. She sees a Rock Rider grab onto the back of one rig as they lay down their bike in the path of another. They must leave behind a few grenades, because the cab of the second rig goes up in flames. Five seconds later it rolls over the body of the Rider, neck snapped and torso riddled with bullets.

Max runs the motorcycle alongside the burning rig and drives with one hand so he can shoot northerners along its spine while Furiosa works on shattering the windshield of another tanker that is dragging two harpoon trucks behind it. The glass collapses as they sweep past the burning rig and out of the path of the harpooned one, and suddenly there is a Rock Rider with a golden revolver lobbing grenades over their heads.

“Good to know you don’t lie about everything, Lady Fury,” Amí bellows as they zip around behind the motorcycle. A bullet from the harpooned rig sheers a strip of cloth and paint off their helmet, and they whoop and hurl a grenade atop its tanker in exchange.

Furiosa spies Cab and Yabby again, far to her right, vanishing into the dust with Bullet Farm fighters perched on the rear seats of their motorcycles, pumping bullets into everything coming their way. A silver spear gleams in the sky.

Max jerks hard to the left as Furiosa’s momentum hauls her right. The strike of the rocket-propelled grenade against the ground tears her loose and drives forth a wave of sand that obscures her sight.

Shrieking fills Furiosa’s ears. She stares at the sky and blinks.

The ground trembles.

Valkyrie scrambles into her field of vision and leans over her, grabbing her shoulders and shaking her. “You don’t get to die out here. No, no you don’t. Not yet.”

Furiosa doesn’t remember Valkyrie losing an eye. “You did,” she croaks.

Valkyrie scowls and shakes her again, and by the time Furiosa sits up Amí’s spine is arched, head thrown back, hands clamped over their side, screaming. Max is hauling her bike up, gunning it around, Nada is hunched over her handlebars and racing towards them, and a war rig hauling a pair of armored steel containers twice as long as Furiosa’s old rig is rolling past them, aiming far wide of the Bullet Farm, another rocket streaming off of it when a harpoon and plow truck tries to latch onto it. It is bearing two crosses, mounted on the front of the first container.

The dust from the initial charge is settling. There are at least four northern war rigs converging on the Bullet Farm, but the big one is charging southwest with a war party of smaller trucks forming up to escort it.

Furiosa gropes for her rifle. “They’re headed for the Citadel.” When nobody answers, she turns around again.

Amí is still on their knees, trying to breathe and failing at it, their helmet and goggles long gone, good eye raw with blood. Red is dripping between their fingers, smearing onto that golden revolver.

Nada sends up a spray of sand when she stops her bike. She jumps off of it, into the dirt and onto her knees, clutching at Amí’s arm. “Let me see, let me see it.”

Amí grimaces. There is blood all over their left hand when they peel it away from their side, dark red staining dust from their clothes, spreading over their ribcage.

“That’s your liver,” Furiosa murmurs. She kneels. “You have five minutes, maybe ten.”

“No,” Nada says. “There’s a doctor somewhere, yeah? At the Bullet Farm?”

Max stops Furiosa’s bike next to them and points. “Think you can get through _that_?”

Another two northern war rigs have joined those encircling the Bullet Farm: six in total, exchanging fire with both those trapped inside and the panicked Bullet Farm troops returning to defend their territory. There are still more northern cars filtering into view, half of them swinging to crush the Bullet Farm fighters between two fronts and the rest following that massive war rig south.

Amí nudges Furiosa. “Can your bike catch that rig?”

She nods.

“Get me on it.”

“No, no.” Nada strips her helmet off. “You’re not going to die here, not today.”

“If that rig reaches the Citadel, three hundred people followed you out of our mountains to die,” Amí grits. “Those boxes are full of weapons that can take the Citadel, I’d bet you anything. If one gets disconnected, might slow them down, weaken them, give their people a chance.” Their gaze shifts from Nada to Furiosa, then back again. “Our people.”

“You’re my soul,” Nada rasps.

Amí touches her hand. “You’re my brains. But don’t make me die out here, so far from the mountains.”

Nada swipes at her eyes, then wraps her arms around Amí’s neck. Their hand clutches a fistful of her hair, before they sit back and force a smile.

“Always said I’d follow you anywhere.”

Nada cups their face and kisses their forehead while Furiosa takes Max’s place on her motorcycle.

“I’ll take Amí’s bike,” he mutters. “Follow you.”

“Okay.” She squeezes his hand.

Amí stumbles over, then climbs on behind her, grunting in air. “Let’s go.”

Furiosa guns the engine. The wheels spit sand, then catch and lurch them forwards. Amí is rasping more than breathing as they tear up along the outside of the war rig’s escort. Furiosa glances over her shoulder. “Thank you.”

Amí shakes their head.” You let Nada die, I’ll haunt you past the end of time.”

Furiosa slides in between the rig and its escort, aiming for the hitch holding the containers together. She watches one of the escort drivers turn their head towards them.

“Good luck, Lady Fury.” Amí grabs the rung of a ladder that goes up the end of the first container and drags their body off the bike, onto the hitch.

Furiosa drops her speed and circles away.

The northerners on top of the rear container take some pot-shots at her, but that stops once their platform starts to weave back and forth. One jumps into the gap between cars and reappears as a rolling corpse thrown under the wheels. Steel sparks and screams, and the second container pulls away from the first. Furiosa dodges around it and doesn’t look back.

Amí is still clinging to the ladder on the first container, and Furiosa opens her throttle as they start to climb. The chaos of the northerners on top of the rig gains a focus when their head emerges.

Grenades roll. Fire blooms.

Max and Nada reach Furiosa’s flanks as a northerner with a shining silver belt buckle bulls through the smoke.

Amí straightens up.

A horribly familiar knife appears.

Amí’s head tilts back, and the blade comes down, and Nada howls the world raw.

Furiosa grabs a pistol off her hip and fires twice. The notherner’s corpse hits the ground a second after Amí’s, and she swings towards Max to avoid them. A scream echoes behind her, and she turns her head.

Close to two hundred bikes are ignoring the chaos around the Bullet Farm to burn out their engines running up behind the northerners, and Furiosa’s heart tightens as she watches cars splinter and bikes shatter. There are still more fresh cars appearing out of the dust north of the Bullet Farm.

Max points from the edge of her vision. “East.”

Furiosa looks. There is another dust cloud boiling up from the southeast, the front edge of it swollen with spikes and wheels highlighted by the fall of the sun.

“Buzzards,” Furiosa breathes.

Cab’s bike rolls out of the mass of Rock Riders, Bullet Farm trooper still clinging to her back. They open a submachine gun on one of the escort cars until its engine belches fire.

Furiosa looks at Max.

Max looks at Furiosa.

She blows the brains out of another escort’s gunners – another flatbed truck, with improvised siding made of various scrap metal sheets – and then Max charges up along the passenger side, leaps off the bike and pulls himself onto the bed of the truck, drops the extended steel ramp of the tailgate to drag in the dirt, then sprints up the length of the truck to haul the driver out of the sunroof by his throat and shove him off the side before disappearing into the cab.

Furiosa takes a deep breath and lines her bike up with the gate. She stares at the shaking, fluttering path for a second, then guns her bike aboard. The change in momentum and friction almost launches her over the top; she stops with a hand’s breadth between her front wheel and the end of the truck bed.

Nada follows her up with much greater ease due to the dirt bike’s smaller engine, and stops halfway down the truck bed. She drops her kickstand and climbs off, hands loose and shaking, eyes bloody from the blowing sand. “Now what?”

“Hope the Buzzards attack them instead of us.”

A harpoon flies from behind them and glances off the side of the war rig.

Furiosa kneels in the shadow of the cab and sights through the window of a pickup truck running a parallel track to their left. Her first shot shatters the passenger window but misses the driver. Her second splatters his brains out the other window.

The pickup slows and begins to drift as the two northerners riding in the rear level weapons at Furiosa. A grenade bounces to a halt between them, and they both freeze.

The detonation triggers a secondary explosion from the truck’s fuel tank. The fireball swallows the car immediately behind it but doesn’t stop it from pulling around the worst of the blast and cutting towards their hijacked truck. Then a Buzzard car clips its rear bumper, sends it into a spin, and keeps going to batter another escort car out of Max’s path.

Max pulls them left, behind the war rig and between the wrecks, taking a couple scratches from the Buzzard car’s spikes but keeping them rolling.

Furiosa grabs the bag of ammo out of her motorcycles and starts reloading her rifle. Nada slumps down next to her. “If we stop that rig, do we have a chance?”

“Maybe.” Furiosa looks over Nada’s shoulder. “Get down.”

There’s a Buzzard dragging their body over the railing. Their left ankle is twisted at a sickening angle as their torso thuds against the boards of the truck bed, a pistol trained on Furiosa.

Nada’s hand drops to a revolver on her side – a gold one. Amí’s. “Shit.”

The Buzzard says something that sounds like a question.

“I don’t speak Buzzard,” Furiosa mutters.

“You think I do?” Nada holds up her palms, then points at herself. “Rock Rider.” At Furiosa. “Citadel.”

The Buzzard grumbles incomprehensibly.

“We shoot them.” Nada gestures at Furiosa and herself, then makes finger-gun motions at the northern war rig. “Yeah? We’re on your side.”

The Buzzard crawls closer on their elbows. Their face is wrapped in cloth, dust-blasted goggles shielding their eyes.

A bullet whizzes overhead.

Furiosa sits up, bracing her rifle against her shoulder. Max’s hand appears from the driver’s window and pumps three rounds into the offending gunner while Furiosa kills their driver. When she looks back, the Buzzard is poking at the dead northerners they left lying in the middle of the truck, the stink of their shit already swirling in the air.

They pull a string of ten-millimeter round from one of the corpses’ pockets, then sweep their goggles off to examine them more closely. Their eyes are heavily wrinkled at the corners, and when they unwind their head covering, Furiosa realizes that they’re as old as any of the Vuvalini: old enough to remember Before. White-gray hair and wrinkles that could be carved into their bone structure are their dominant features. The Buzzard knocks their pistol against their breastbone. “Vik.”

Nada and Furiosa glance at each other.

“ _Vik_ ,” the Buzzard repeats. They stab a finger at Furiosa. “Citadel?”

“Fury,” Nada says. “That’s Fury.” She waves to herself. “Nada.”

Vik nods as they belly-crawl up next to Furiosa’s bike. “Know little word when child,” they say. They gesture at themselves and Furiosa. “Woman.” At Nada. “Man.”

Nada shakes her head. “Woman.”

Vik frowns.

Nada draws a circle to indicate all of them. “All women.” She sighs. “It doesn’t matter.”

Vik purses her lips to consider this, then shrugs. She raises her pistol. “Gun?” When they both nod, she shoots a northerner off the top of the war rig and smiles. She leans against Furiosa’s bike and pings a couple rounds through an escort car that draws up alongside them. She says “good” when it veers helplessly into another and tangles up a third. Then she points at her ankle. “No good.”

“That’s okay,” Furiosa says. “We’re not going anywhere soon.”

Nada nods at her and cradles Amí’s revolver against her chest as she turns to look for more people to kill.

Furiosa grabs her ammo bag and smacks the cab’s rear window. Max slides it open. She hands him her rifle, then climbs up and slides into the cab feet-first. “We picked up a Buzzard.”

Max nods. “How’s the leg?”

“Fine.” She stares out the windshield. Max has pulled them away from the war rig and its escorts, letting the Buzzards hammer them as they swarm out of the southeast. She squints straight south. “Do you see that?” Bright lights at the horizon, with the sun too high in the sky for stars to come out.

“Gas Town,” Max says.

Furiosa exhales through her nose. “Kero and her people can handle them. But not that.” She nods at the war rig.

“So we stop it.”

The truck shivers.

Furiosa turns around to see two more Rock Riders dismounting their bikes. Vik has maneuvered herself over to the side of the truck, forearms braced on the top of the improvised siding. She’s procured a hunting rifle from one of the corpses.

Nada pokes her head into the cab. “Those southern fuckers going to help us or what?”

“Don’t know.” Furiosa leans out her window to shoot a bike roaring up beside them before she recognizes Yabby. There is no Bullet Farmer riding with her.

“You’re alive?” Yabby yells.

Furiosa points at the truck bed. “Get on.”

Yabby nods and drops back.

“Clear a path,” Nada calls over her shoulder, and disappears from the window.

The truck shudders again. There’s some scraping and some skidding, and then Yabby hooks her elbows over the window frame and drags herself into the cab head-first. “We’ve lost most of the Bullet Farmers – they’re busy saving their own skins.”

“Are they winning?”

“Can’t tell.” Yabby rubs encrusted dirt from her cheeks. “Can we stop that rig?”

“We can try. I have a plan.” Furiosa hands her the bag of ammo. “Take my spot for a minute.”

Yabby squeezes past her into the front, then hunches over in the seat, jamming fresh rounds into her empty clips.

Furiosa climbs out the back. “Vik?”

The Buzzard flicks an eye at her between shots.

Furiosa kneels next to her. “Can you drive?” She mimes a steering wheel.

Vik looks at her left leg – twisted, useless – and then at her right – whole, functional. She nods.

Furiosa gestures at herself and the Rock Riders. “ _We_ need to get on _that_.” She points at the war rig.

Another Rock Rider bumps aboard.

Vik nods.  She tears a strip of cloth from her head wrap and jams it between her teeth, then makes a lifting motion with her arms. Furiosa gets under her left shoulder and Nada under her right, and they haul her up the length of the truck to the window. Vik pulls her knees up to her chest so they can get her through the window legs-first, Max and Yabby guiding her body into the driver’s seat while she makes muffled hissing noises. She immediately stomps on the gas to stop their gradual deceleration, spits out the cloth, and grins over her shoulder at Furiosa. Then she yells something out the window in Buzzard.

Max and Yabby climb out the rear window so they’re standing on the truck bed with Furiosa, Nada, and the three other Rock Riders.

“We’re going to get on that rig and stop it,” Furiosa says – promises.

Everyone nods. Yabby and the Riders clamber atop the cab as Vik brings them up behind the rig.

Nada looks at Furiosa. “We lied to that little girl.”

Max glances between them, then scales the cab after the others.

“I still want you to tell her that story. What you did before. But you should tell her this one, too.”

The first of the Riders makes a running leap to grab the top of the container. Yabby follows.

“You can tell her this one,” Furiosa says. She pulls her cane off her motorcycle, unsheathes the knife, and tucks it into her belt, then hauls herself up the cab in time to see Max jump. When she goes, she aims for the ladder, takes a running step, feels her bad leg scream, pushes off with her left, and catches the ladder three rungs from the top. The rest of her body slams hard against the metal, but she drags herself up anyway, ignoring it. She’s on the top rung when a foot in a bright red boot plants itself next to her head.

Red Boots is a hulking white man burned pink by the sun, and he has a Rock Rider by the neck, hoisting them over the end of the container as their feet kick at the air.

Furiosa lunges up and plunges her knife into the back of Red Boots’ knee, then yanks it free as he falls. He goes down headfirst – all the way down – cracking his skull on the trailer hitch and then bouncing off to the side like a ragdoll.

The Rock Rider lands on Nada a second before she jumps and topples her backwards, but she grabs their waist and doesn’t let go as momentum tries to carry them off, feet braced on the hood of the truck. “We’re fine!” she calls over the engines. “Go!”

Furiosa scrambles onto the top of the rig. Max has a man in a chokehold; Furiosa stabs him in the heart and pulls Max to his feet.

He kisses her forehead so fast she flinches, then shoots dead another northerner sprinting towards them with a combat knife.

“Down!” Yabby screams. Furiosa and Max crumple as a line of machine-gun fire rakes over them.

Nada drags herself onto the container just as the stream of bullets ends. Her eyes are wide and empty. She rolls half-upright and hurls a grenade towards the machine gunner’s car.

The war rig lurches. A harpoon truck has finally forged its way through the escorts; it quivers and skids as it drops its plow, straining to resist the war rig’s momentum. Another squeals up next to it, swings wide around an escort car, then plunges its harpoon into the left side of the container.

The war rig’s engine groans.

The rocket launcher is up front, between the crosses. It hasn’t done anything for a while, but as Furiosa watches it pivots and paints an arc of silver that ends on top of that escort car running between harpoon trucks, but also blows both of the trucks out of existence. A hole gets torn out of the rear corner of the container by the second harpoon. There are yellow lights glowing within.

Max holds out a hand to Nada. “Grenade?”

“I only have two left.”

“Fine.”

Furiosa plunges a bullet into the man wielding the rocket launcher. He spins it towards her. She drills a hole through his neck. “Let’s get up front,” she says.

Nada frowns at her, then at Max, shrugs, hands him her grenades, shoots the last two northerners on top of the rig and runs to loot their corpses of weapons.

Furiosa looks Max in the eye. “You’ll have four seconds.” Then she knocks her fist against her breastbone and follows Nada.

Max waits until they’ve thudded over onto the cab of the war rig before he crawls over to the hole and tosses the grenades in. Furiosa watches him stand and run.

He makes it three and a half steps before the fireball eats the rear end of the container, four and a half before it’s caught up to him. At the end of the container it swallows him and keeps going. It hits her before Max does, slamming into her; she clutches at him, buries her face in his jacket, and feels the fire rage over them, take them off the rig, into something beyond.

***

Valkyrie is back again. She’s staring dully at Furiosa, her arms folded across her chest. They’re moving. On a truck.

Another Valkyrie sits next to the first one. The new one has a beard. She’s been crying.

***

“It’s not a fucking lizard,” Nada says when Max wakes up. “It’s a fucking swarm of crows. Starving, dying, cultist crows.” She looks at Max, her face wet. “They didn’t fucking stop. Their big rig is gone, and they haven’t stopped.”

Max looks around. They’re back on the hijacked truck. Furiosa is slumped against the railing. She has blood in her hair. She looks like she’s asleep.

Max tries to sit up. It doesn’t work. He crawls to Furiosa and lays his head against her good leg.

She sighs.

He closes his eyes.


	11. A Promise

The war rig’s horn could wake the dead.

Furiosa opens her eyes. She sees Cab and Nada sitting across from her, Max in her lap, the wasteland rolling by them. She touches Max’s singed hair. “Yabby?”

“She’s up front with the Buzzard,” Cay says.

“Did we…?”

Nada shakes her head. “We’re almost to the Citadel.”

“No.”

“Yes,” Cab says. “Look.”

Furiosa turns her head. Vik has taken them out of the main pack of northern cars; she’s keeping pace with them, but far enough away that nothing short of a sniper rifle is practical. There are four good-sized war rigs in the group and close to two hundred smaller cars with Buzzards still zipping between them, occasionally shredding a car, occasionally getting blown up. A group of fifteen or twenty Citadel cars is tailing Vik’s truck, the remaining Rock Riders behind them. They have half of the Riders and cars that they left the Citadel with.

“Gas Town?” she asks.

“We’re about to find out.” Cab stands.

Furiosa nudges Max, and he moves off of her. They all squint south. The sun is close to setting. A disorderly pack of Gas Town vehicles are boiling up out of the south, one tanker and maybe twenty cars and bikes. From the southwest comes the Citadel’s defense. Kero hauls on the war rig’s horn once more.

A single rocket arches from the northern war rig – they must be saving rounds for the Citadel’s walls. It’s aimed south, at Gas Town. The tanker is the target.

Furiosa knows what’s going to happen before it does. The tanker is full of Guzzoline. The explosion takes out half a dozen cars, and the rest veer wildly out of the way, a hole torn out of their core.

“So much for helping them crush us,” Cab murmurs.

The Citadel swarm reacts immediately to Gas Town’s tragedy: they transform from a cluster into a line, spread wide across the desert. The snipers on the war rig begin to pick off targets.

“Where’s my rifle?”

“Here,” Cab says, and hands it to her. The barrel and scope are badly scraped but intact.

Her test shot takes a northerner’s head off their shoulders. She watches Max try to stand.

He does it slowly, with great caution, balancing against the bumping and swaying of the truck, but his knees don’t collapse and his hands work well enough to hold a gun. He offers Furiosa a small smile.

Vik swings the truck east towards the northern war party; the pack following her takes that as a signal and swarms up around them. A few Rock Riders salute as they ride by.

“We should be out there,” Furiosa says.

“Both of you – probably all three of you – are concussed.” Cab stands. “Don’t push your luck.” She shoves the ramp down, then strides over to her motorcycle and knocks the kickstand up as she swings aboard. That War Boy representative Furiosa has seen so many times and never learned the name of climbs onto the back seat. She hadn’t even known he was on the truck. She watches them thunder off the tailgate, chewing up the sand, sprinting east.

Max fumbles a clip into a pistol. “Now what?”

“Don’t die.” She pokes at a loose bolt in her arm.

Max hums and brushes his knuckles down her back as she clambers upright, supporting herself with her rifle.

After a quick scan of the battle, she climbs on top of the cab. She sits with her feet braced on the hood, in the dent left by Nada when the other Rock Rider dropped on top of her, and sights through her scope as the Citadel defenders crash into the invaders. Kero takes the war rig straight through the middle of the pack. When it comes out the other side, one of the northern war rigs has smoke pouring from its engines. Furiosa picks off a few survivors making a stand on top of it, then turns her head when she hears a dirt bike growl.

Nada, alone, zooms across her vision.

Max hooks his elbows over the top of the cab. “You alright?”

“I’m fine.” She fires again.

The smoking rig launches three rockets towards the Citadel. They crash into the sand far short of their mark.

Max frowns and scrambles up next to her. They watch two harpoon and plow trucks latch onto the front-running northern war rig. A rocket flips one onto its side, but the chain doesn’t break, and Buzzards and Rock Riders ping bombs off of and into the rig until they blow out the engines. The smoking one peters to a halt. “Two left,” Max murmurs.

Kero’s rig opens fire. They have harpooners mounted on the top, lancing smaller cars to their deaths. One of the two remaining northern rigs begins firing off rockets indiscriminately as its compatriot charges for the Citadel.

Vik slams on the gas, and Furiosa grabs Max to keep him from sliding. The crackling of sniper rifles becomes more prominent. Gas Town’s cars are a line of fire, some burning, some spitting bullets, most already retreating. Vik yells something that sounds like an insult in their direction.

Yabby punctures one of the charging war rig’s wheels, but it has seventeen others to bear its weight. A rocket smacks into the canyon between the buttes.

Furiosa pounds on the roof with her metal hand. “Faster!”

Vik snarls something incomprehensible back at her.

Another harpoon truck catches the rig – the last one they have. It slows down the rig just long enough for Vik to level with its rear wheels, and then gets blasted apart. The Rock Riders that stayed behind rally against the rig, dropping their bikes and clinging to the sides of its tanker.

Furiosa stands. Max stares at her when she hands him her rifle and takes the shotgun he’s holding to strap across her chest. She closes her fist. Then she jumps.

She catches the top of the tanker, loses her grip, and slips down the side until she can grab a hold on the rectangular beams supporting the tank, feet grazing the sand before she tucks them up, gripping a beam between her knees. Her thigh won’t hold for long.

Upside-down, she crawls up the length of the undercarriage. There’s no secret hold on this rig, no way through, but there are still wheels. She pulls the shotgun off her chest and fires at the two front wheels supporting the left side of the tanker and hitch. They shred, and the rig begins to list to the left.

Furiosa shuts her eyes and breathes. Then she hauls herself all the way to the left side of the rig and claws her way upwards until she can drag her body into the space between tanker and cab. She takes two steadying breaths and scales the cab.

The driver’s door swings open when Furiosa’s body blocks the light through the sunroof. White skin, tangled red hair, blue eyes, silver gun.

Furiosa drops to her stomach and grabs the driver by her hair.

She hisses and grazes Furiosa’s cheek with a bullet before she knocks the gun away with her metal hand. “You cannot kill a god; you will wish-”

It takes all the force in Furiosa’s body to throw her off the rig.

Rock Riders are still fighting northerners on top of the tanker when she looks back. But forward – the driver must have jammed the accelerator – the rock walls of the Citadel are a hundred meters away.

Furiosa jumps. Her right leg crumples when she strikes the dirt, and she hears herself scream. Then the rig hits the Citadel, and she curls into a ball.

***

The Buzzard stops the truck when she realizes what’s about to happen. A wheel bounces past them as the northern rig slams into the cliff and explodes. After the shock waves passes, Max slides onto the hood and points the Buzzard left, at a woman climbing to her feet.

She fires into the windshield as they approach. Max has to jump on her to keep the Buzzard from running her over. She tells Max he’s a demon, that they’ll all rot from the inside, that their souls will burn and freeze by turns as hers is raised into healing warmth. They tie her hands behind her back and the Buzzard shoves a bundle of cloth between her teeth.

The rest of the army is scattered. Their last war rig is out of rockets. They’re running it down as Max watches.

There are dead everywhere.

Max looks at the ruin where the rig struck the Citadel. He sees bent, wrecked crosses. He sees a person in the dirt at the edge of the crater, covered in sand.

“Max?” Yabby says.

He runs.

Furiosa is alive. In the dirt, covered in dirt, bleeding. She is _alive_. She opens her eyes when he touches her face.

“Hey.”

She smiles. Words take some time. “Fool.”

“You hurt?”

She sighs, then nods. “Leg.”

“Okay.” Max waits for her to sit up. He fits her right arm around his neck, slides under her shoulder. She plants her left foot in the sand and leans on him. Together, they stand.

***

After an hour of sniper fire, Rock Rider grenades, and lethal harassment by the Buzzards and remaining Citadel cars, what’s left of the northern invasion force puts the Citadel in their mirrors and flees back in the direction of the Bullet Farm. They let them go.

They put the redhead northerner in the same cell where they held their Buzzard captive. Her curses follow them almost all the way to the entrance.

As the sun sets, Furiosa sits on the hood of the flatbed with Max, safe in the shadows between the buttes. Vik is on the ground in front of the truck, warily letting the Dag splint her leg; it took ten minutes to convince her that the process was intended to help, not hurt. She’ll need crutches or a wheelchair for a while. Furiosa had been trying to explain the process, but gave it up until Polly or another suitable example appeared. Yabby vanished long ago to help chase down northerners.

Their people are returning to the Citadel now – a small fraction of what they had in the morning. Three quarters of the Citadel’s cars are wreckage; a third of their fighters are corpses, and another third may not live to see the sunrise, or have new permanent impairments. More than half of the Rock Riders who rode out with them did not come back.

A single dirt bike separates out from the stream of cars heading home. Nada stops in front of the truck. Her hair and beard are crusty with dirt and blood. She shakes with exhaustion when she moves. She seems to think about climbing on the hood with them, then settles for leaning against it.

The Dag touches her leg, still kneeling next to Vik. “It’s good to see you.”

Nada shakes her head.

The Dag rises. “There’s someone who will want to see you.” She gestures at Vik to indicate that she needs to stay sitting, then walks around the truck into one of the buttes.

Furiosa’s left arm is around Max’s shoulders. She holds out her right hand to Nada, and she takes it.

The stream has thinned to a trickle when the Dag returns with Sapling in her arms and Cheedo at her side. Furiosa watched Yabby ride a motorcycle into the lower garage, but hasn’t seen Cab.

The Dag deposits Sapling on the hood of the truck, and she immediately wraps one arm around Furiosa’s calf. She does a tally to register Furiosa, Max, and Nada, and then cranes her neck to see Vik, who raises her eyebrows and sticks out her tongue. Sapling does a quick giggle, then frowns. “Where’s Namí?”

Nada bites her bottom lip. Furiosa looks at Max.

Sapling wraps tighter around Furiosa’s leg. “They promised.”

“They didn’t have a choice,” Nada says. She folds her elbows on the hood. “They had to do something, and people like you and me don’t get a say when those things happen. So they had to go, and they didn’t get to come back.”

“But they _promised_.”

“I know,” Nada says as her face crumples. A drop of water clears a black track through the dust on her cheeks.

Sapling looks around. “And they don’t get to come back? Ever?”

Furiosa shakes her head.

Sapling lets go of her and crawls over to Nada. “Did you get to say goodbye?”

Nada smiles through salt water. “I did. I was lucky.”

“Okay,” Sapling says. “I wish I got to. But if you got to, that’s okay.”

Nada nods. “We have a way to say goodbye when people are already gone. Tomorrow, I’ll show you. Okay?”

“Okay.”

***

Cab doesn’t get to come back, either. When they convene the council after sunset, she and her War Boy copilot are both absent. The other War Boy and one of the white Wretched representatives are gone, too – the only other people who rode out that morning. Dixie and Polly both spent the afternoon on top of the Citadel with rifles, as did Toast and the two remaining Wretched representatives. Everyone is tired.

Furiosa leans heavily on her cane on the walk up, and sits between Max and Nada on the dais. The empty chairs glare at her.

Capable is the first one to speak, after a few minutes of silence and blank staring: “What happened to Bullet Farm?”

Furiosa shrugs, then remembers that the only council members who saw it are dead. “Northerners tried to take them. Didn’t see how it ended.”

“And Gas Town…?”

Furiosa shrugs again.

“They took one punch and collapsed,” Dixie volunteers. “Give it a couple days; they’ll send a tanker begging for water, swearing fealty. Whoever’s left there, anyway.”

“Fine.” Capable looks at Nada. “What will your people do?”

“I came with three hundred and eight,” she says. “I have a hundred and twenty-three left.” Her hands, shaking, clasp each other. “We need to burn and honor our dead. Some will want to go home immediately. I would ask for a few more days of shelter for the rest of us.”

Toast sighs. “We all lost something today.” She glances around the table. “If any Rock Riders want to remain here permanently… who would protest?”

The council is silent.

At the far end of the table, Polly shakes her head. “We need all the bastard freaks we can get to keep this place standing, it seems.”

Nada half-smiles. “Your hospitality is appreciated.”

“You won’t be the only one staying for a while,” Furiosa tells her. She twists her head. “Vik?”

Wheels creak. It takes Vik three tries to maneuver her chair through the door, until the Dag helps her make the angle. She mutters in Buzzard and rolls across the floor until she’s next to Nada. She scowls at the council.

“This is Vik,” Furiosa says. “She’s a Buzzard. And she saved all of your lives today.”

Polly rolls her chair around the end of the table. She says something in Buzzard.

Vik squints at her and responds.

Polly rattles off a long sentence, pauses to think, then says a word in a questioning tone. And then she says something that sounds like a name.

Vik stabs a finger at her and rushes out a string of garbled noise.

Polly says a lot of things and then “Polly.”

Vik throws up her arms. She looks at her chair, then at Polly’s, and cackles until she snorts.

“You know each other,” The Dag says.

Polly nods. “She’s my mother’s sister.” She holds out her wide, sun-browned hand so Vik can clasp it in her gnarled, spindle-fingered ones.

“Of all the days,” Toast mutters. She rests her face in her hands. “Does anyone have anything else to talk about? Our prisoner?”

“Kill her,” mutters the remaining white Wretched.

“She’s probably been brainwashed her whole life,” says the black Wretched. “Send some of the War Boys to talk sense to her.”

“Seconded,” Dixie says.

Toast and Capable looks at each other and nod agreement. Toast sets her hands flat on the table. “That’ll be done in the morning. For now, let’s everyone eat and get some sleep. We earned it.”

***

Max doesn’t tell Furiosa how many times he thought she was dead. He doesn’t tell her anything. He holds her, and lets himself be held in return, and he’s still there in the morning, breathing into her shoulder, and that’s enough.

***

They ride back to the Bullet Farm to find their dead, and learn that the war is not over. The war rigs are gutted and empty, the Bullet Farm’s factories and mines cold, slaves dueling invaders in the steel-shredded streets.

Some of the northerners run when they see the war rig. Some take one look, then fight harder, until the Citadel’s platoon of snipers put them out of their misery. A few – all women – try to lay down their weapons and surrender. They tie their hands, hobble their ankles, and gag them, but a few still get free to slit more throats before they’re shot down.

The last northerner to die is a man: short, stocky, barrel-chested. White skin, white hair, red-spattered white clothes. A submachine gun in each hand, looted from Bullet Farm corpses. Furiosa puts a bullet through his left eye. The rest run after that.

“I wonder if he was their god-king,” she says to Max a few minutes later, kneeling over the body.

“I thought he was on that big rig. They didn’t do so well once that went down.”

Furiosa shrugs. “Guess we’ll never know.”

If the Citadel’s forces were devastated, the Bullet Farm’s were shattered, and the pieces crushed underfoot. There is one surviving Bullet Farm War Boy for every ten or twelve slaves, and no one knows what to do. Furiosa and Yabby and Kero move between the groups – War Boys, gun factory slaves, ammo factory slaves, mine slaves – telling them to pick a few of their best, to arrange a council. Telling them that this is a beginning, not just an end.

They came to collect their dead, but they wind up spending the night, trying to help the Bullet Farm sort itself out. They make pyres for the dead that blot out the stars.

Most of the Rock Riders are burned together with the unsalvageable portions of their bikes. There’s a separate pyre for the Citadel – a few friends and kin claim bodies to be brought back to the Citadel whole, so they know which plant to kneel next to when sorrow gets too heavy.

Nada brings Sapling along on her bike, wrapped in Max’s too-big jacket to protect her from the sand, keeps her far back from the Bullet Farm until the fighting is done. They ride out together into the desert to find Amí, and make their own pyre as the sun sets.

It gets dark quickly, but Nada waits for Furiosa and Max to find them before she sets the spark. She found what must be Amí’s bike somewhere on the track between the Bullet Farm and Citadel, (Furiosa assumes because that makes it feel better, more complete, than having a random bike carry them out of the world) and laid them atop it. She doesn’t try to hide their face from Sapling, lets them stare up at the sky through the roiling smoke, and sits in the dirt so close to the fire that the tears evaporate before they reach her beard.

Furiosa sits further away, next to Max, with Sapling in her lap so she can play with Furiosa’s metal arm when the smoke hurts her eyes and she gets too tired to understand the depth of the grief surrounding her.

“Can I ask for something?” Nada murmurs once the fire burns down to scorched steel and embers.

Sapling is asleep in Furiosa’s lap. “Of course,” she says.

“I want to take some of them home. To the mountains. See what’s left of our people. But… can I leave some with you? For one of those trees?”

Furiosa looks at her. “What kind?”

Nada smiles at the embers. “Those little red ones? Cherry?”

“We’ll do it as soon as we get back tomorrow. And you can go do whatever you need to.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

Furiosa nods.

Max clears his throat. He leans forward, squinting at the fire. “They did save us, you know.”

“I don’t need you to tell me that. I was there. I saw. I watched them… become that lump of meat there.” Nada wraps her arms around her knees. “I know they’re not coming back. But don’t pacify me with some story about they’ll be remembered. You’ll forget them. The mountains won’t. That tree won’t.”

Max nods and withdraws.

Sapling still has his jacket, and their bikes only provide limited protection from the winds and the cold. Furiosa taps his shoulder and passes Sapling into his arms, then reaches into her motorcycle’s chest to find a pair of blankets. She hands one to Max, and limps over to Nada to wrap the second one around her.

Nada clutches at the blanket without comment, but she catches Furiosa’s eyes and nods.

Furiosa pulls off her arm and picks a spot in the dirt next to Max with Sapling curled between them. He tosses the blanket over all of them, and Furiosa reaches for his hand, tangling their fingers while she settles her head on the sand.

The fire burns to ashes with Nada sitting her vigil.

***

Sapling rides back with Furiosa and Max on the war rig. They sit on the very top, facing backwards, watching the Bullet Farm shrink behind them. Many of the cars following them are carrying bodies. They zig-zag between smoldering wrecks and craters in the sand, and occasionally one stops so people can climb out and tear through the remains in search of something that used to be a familiar face.

Nada rides with her people and Amí’s ashes.

They plant the cherry tree on the eastern rim of the gardens. Six Rock Riders help dig up the sapling from the nursery, and they and Nada move it, pick a spot, and plant it, quietly nudging Furiosa and the gardeners out of their way when they offer to help. Polly and Vik sit together in their chairs at the edge of the scene, cleaning guns and murmuring to each other.

Nada only spends one more night in the Citadel. The following morning, she leaves with almost a hundred Rock Riders. The rest are those too hurt to ride and their families, plus a few who have asked to remain indefinitely. Sapling sits in Capable’s arms and cries as the bikes empty from the garage. The Dag and Cheedo send them with seeds that might survive in the mountains, and a box of salves and remedies. Those who were trained by Furiosa’s snipers leave with rifles.

“You’ll always be welcome back here,” Toast tells Nada as she’s starting her engine. “Any of you.”

Nada smiles. “We’ll see.” She looks at Furiosa. “Don’t forget to tell those stories, yeah?”

“I won’t.”

Nada knocks a salute against her helmet. “Good luck, Lady Fury.” And then she’s gone.

***

Furiosa and Max stand next to Amí’s tree to watch the Rock Riders go. They cut straight through Buzzard territory, hopping dunes, skirting nuke scars, kicking up billows of dust that settle long after they’ve passed. Their mountains are just over the edge of the horizon.

Furiosa leans on her cane. “What will you do now?”

Max shrugs.

“There’s still a bike for you, if you want it.”

He shakes his head. “Nah, I’ll…” he trails off.

“Make your own way?” she murmurs.

Max shakes his head and points south. “Gas Town.”

There’s a tanker trundling up the road. Two of them, actually. Flying white flags.

The Rock Riders have become a smear in the distance.

Furiosa turns to head inside.

Max reaches for her and stops just short of her shoulder. She looks back at him. “I’m not…” He makes circling motions with his hands. “Not good.”

Furiosa glances at the tree next to him, at the dust-blotted Rock Riders, at the Gas Town tankers.

Max is faltering with his words. He gathers them up, cradles them carefully. “It’s good here. Feels good. Don’t know if that’s… right. For me. To be here.”

Furiosa clears her throat. “If you leave, you can always come back.” She faces him and waits until he meets her eyes. “But if you leave, it has to be because you want to, not because you feel like you have to.”

Max half-smiles. He stares out over the edge of the butte for a long second, caught in the tangle of his own brain, then turns back to her. “Want help with those tankers?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I’d like that.”

Max walks up to her. When she holds out her flesh-and-bone hand, he claps it, palm warm against her skin.

They take their next steps together, into the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have written more, faster in the last six weeks than I have in a long time - during my last great writing marathon, it took me three months to produce a similar number of words. This has been a TRIP, make no mistake, and I'm sorry to those of you who probably turned up for smut and were disappointed by this demisexual author, and to those who wanted a happily ever after instead of another war, but I love all of you who have left notes of encouragement and love all the way and didn't kick me for getting over-invested in the subplots of my OCs. You are all amazing. There will be at least one AU involving these losers in the near future, so keep an eye on the horizon. <3


End file.
